This week TidBITS brings you news of AOL’s purchase of ANS, the reason some Performas don’t include the modems promised on the box, and how to find Internet mailing lists. Dave Nagel of Apple responds to Dave Winer’s recent soliloquy about Apple’s failure to properly woo developers, and the issue finishes with Adam’s write- up about his recent Macintosh marathon, involving backups, disk formatting, data restoration, and a tangle with System 7.5.
As the holiday gift-giving season approaches (notice that we said nothing until after Thanksgiving - a bit of a pet peeve here in the U.S. where we're often deluged with holiday capitalism earlier and earlier each year), we're hoping that readers can contribute paragraph-long suggestions of your favorite new games and gifts for Macintosh owners
America Online buys ANS -- In a distinct case of putting $35 million of its money where its mouth has been, America Online today announced plans to purchase ANS (Advanced Network & Services), the company that has managed and operated the NSFnet Backbone Service since 1990
Mike Blake-Knox writes:
A freeware alternative to DeskTape for putting Mac data on a DAT is Sauro Speranzo's suntar program. I've used it to transport large amounts of data between Mac and Unix systems
Internet mailing lists are often hard to find, since there are so many. However, there's a Web page that supposedly lists all of them. It enables you to sort alphabetically or by category, and when you sort by category, you can get more detailed information on the list
Apple's latest product info is available right at your fax machine via AppleFax, a fax-back service Apple provides. Those in the U.S. can dial 800/510-2834 for sales literature or 800/505-0171 for common tech support solutions
High demand for certain Macintosh Performa models is to blame, Apple says, for its decision to ship some new systems without the Global Village modem that would normally be included in the box
Piet Seiden writes:
I know the treatment of non-U.S. Macintosh users is a recurring issue in TidBITS. But apparently earlier pleas have only had minimum effect as problems continue to appear almost every time I examine some new application's keyboard shortcuts for menu commands
DeskTape Price -- Oops, the list price I quoted for DeskTape in TidBITS-253 was out of date. The current list price is $329, and you can get it via mail order from Club Mac for $289
Dantz Development Contact Info -- I keep accidently including old phone numbers and contact information for Dantz Development because I go back to old TidBITS issues to extract them
Mosaic Name Changes -- While I'm cleaning up administrative details, it's worth noting that Mosaic Communications Corporation has changed its name to Netscape Communications Corporation and the name of its excellent Web browser from Mosaic Netscape to Netscape
[This is a response from Dave Nagel of Apple to Dave Winer's editorial in TidBITS-251. -Adam]
You're wrong in thinking that we neither value our developers nor recognize their contributions
Life isn't as simple as it used to be in the Mac world. A few weeks ago, I decided the time had come for some fall cleaning on my Mac. A few things were happening on my hard disk that I couldn't quite explain (disk accesses at strange times, primarily), and I wanted to install System 7.5, a SCSI Manager 4.3-savvy driver, and generally fix things up