Apple experiments with new varieties of the Macintosh this month, so we have a report on the Macintosh TV and the Quadra 610, DOS Compatible, which wins the worst name of the year award. Andrew Johnston reviews the powerful and popular BBEdit, Mark Anbinder explains some of the issues behind FirstClass bounces, and readers provide various useful comments, such as international availability of the Color It deal.
This issue comes a day early since I'm spending much of the week at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Hypertext here in Seattle. Monday night I hope to attend a reception in honor of Ted Nelson, the father of hypertext and creator of the Xanadu system
Mark H. Anbinder writes:
Thanks are due to several alert readers who let us know that the lack of FPU on the low-end Quadra 610 model only appears to affect Apple U.S.A
Chris Jackson writes:
I recently discovered that MicroFrontier offers their special pricing to international customers as well (see TidBITS #199). The international price for Color It is $15, which includes shipping, as opposed to the $8.37 it costs in the U.S
Communicate Coughing -- If you try the Communicate Lite demo mentioned in TidBITS #199, and you leave it connected but idle in the background, it will make a slight coughing noise every five minutes to let you know you are still connected, much as AppleLink does
Trivia quiz for the week time... Can you place these quotes?
"It can run Mac software at about the speed of a IIcx,
PC software at the speed of a 33 MHz 386 clones..."
"Apple decided to take advantage of their "MacOS Blue"
project and the ready availability of inexpensive
Pentiums (Intel's trade name for the processor commonly
but incorrectly known as the 586) by shipping an
Intel-based Macintosh late this summer."
Unless you search way back in TidBITS, you probably won't the first quote, since it came from TidBITS #52, whereas the second quote came from TidBITS #171, a more recent issue
Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers
Although Maury Markowitz's article on avoiding non-delivery notices (NDNs) on FirstClass systems (see TidBITS #199) has some useful suggestions, a bit more explanation might be in order so that FirstClass administrators can make educated decisions on what's right for their systems.
Expiry dates should be set such that the contents of a conference or folder won't be unwieldy to the new user, but more importantly so that the conference won't overflow
Is Macintosh TV the wave of the future for the next generation of Macintosh-using couch potatoes? Or is it merely a special edition gimmick that will run afoul of societal customs? That's what Apple intends to find out.
Macintosh TV combines a IIvx-class Macintosh with a color television monitor
President, Johnston/Johnston Consulting, Macintosh Developer
I first started using BBEdit 2.2 about six months ago and was impressed with all of the features available in this freeware package from Bare-Bones Software