In a surprise announcement, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed last week that Microsoft has been in labor negotiations with its testing and quality assurance staff for some time

The Macintosh was treated to a blast from the past today, as startup Dogcow Software announced that it has acquired rights to the popular disk editor FEdit from its original developers

Complaining of feeling increasingly "old and stodgy," TidBITS publisher and Macintosh Internet maven Adam C. Engst announced today his plans to retire gracefully as part of the InterNIC's recently announced downsizing plans

Future of the Web? -- I'd like to share an Internet utility that I think has great potential to help us break out of the rut that we've gotten into on the Web

We'd Like to Thank The Academy -- In a ceremony held in Hollywood early last week, TidBITS was presented with an Academy Award for Best Short Electronic Newsletter with Weird Capitalization Written Directly for the Internet

What Me, Monopolize? -- In a move that may ruffle the feathers of the FTC, Melinda French, the wife of Microsoft's billionaire owner Bill Gates, announced today that she intends to buy Compaq Computer for an undisclosed amount of cash and Microsoft stock

When released later this year, Windows 95 is expected to ship on 24 to 28 high density floppy disks, and as a result, rumors have abounded that Microsoft is amassing huge quantities of floppies in anticipation of fulfilling millions of orders for the new operating system

Director of Technical Inertia, Baka Industries Inc. In a move related to last week's announcement of free replacements for Apple's original M5140 PowerBook AC adapters, Apple announced that, effective 01-Apr-95, it will provide replacement batteries at no cost to certain PowerBook owners

Impatiently waiting for the wonders of OpenDoc? Wait no longer! You can now have your OpenDoc cake and eat it too. A software startup from Georgia has announced CodeSucker, a program that beats Apple to the OpenDoc punch

UrbanWerks Incorporated, a startup company based in the Cayman Islands with employees worldwide, today announced the immediate availability of its new Macintosh application development environment, Multimedia C++ 1.0

Frankly, I'm bored with the current crop of word processors. They all have more features than my vintage 1985 copy of MacWrite, and in that ten year interim, few of the new features make it easier to figure out what to write

In a move sure to spark some serious competition, Los Angeles-based Guzzlers, Inc., announced the release of Grand 'Ol Party 0.93b1 for Newton, billed as the world's only continuous, real-time guide to the Los Angeles party and entertainment scene. Global Positioning Technology -- Grand 'Ol Party (GOP) is a Newton application that uses a PCMCIA-based Global Positioning System (GPS) transceiver to ascertain the user's location at any given time

Ralph Amundesen wrote with some interesting information about IBM. Evidently, IBM is so worried about OS/2 that the company has expanded its battalion of salesbots by drafting the entire company

I'm beginning to like living in a metropolitan area - there's so much more happening here in terms of computers. At a local computer fair put on by the University of Washington a few weeks ago, I came across a small local company with a product that could become extremely popular with anyone who doesn't like losing data

Microsoft is just full of surprises these days. First Fox, what could be NeXT? The latest news from Redmond is that Mr. Bill has apparently overcome his dislike of Steve Jobs and the company will be porting its most popular applications to the NeXT