I'm extremely pleased to announce that Tonya has resigned from her position at Microsoft to devote more time to TidBITS and other projects, including books and Internet adventures

IBM and Motorola have announced a 100 MHz version of the PowerPC 601 chip that is the current mainstay of the Power Macintosh line. The added speed over the existing 80 MHz chip will no doubt be welcome if Apple decides to use it, perhaps late this year, but we can't help but think that the announcement is merely the latest salvo in the "Mine is bigger than yours" marketing war between Motorola and Intel.

Rick Holzgrafe notes that we implied last issue that the Drag Manager's functionality (dragging text to the desktop to create a "scrap" file, for instance) will appear "automagically" in existing applications

Paul Westbrook and others tell us that Applied Engineering has gone out of business. It appears that a slow market for accelerators was the death knell for the fifteen-year-old company.

PC Pursuit long distance services from Sprint were discontinued as of 01-Apr-94 (no April fooling). The services provided fixed rate charges on long-distance calls, offering a useful way to regularly dial long distance to online sources

A number of people disagreed with my statement about all hard drives being approximately equal in reliability. I based that statement on my experience and on the fact that when I looked at the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) ratings for modern drives, all stood between 150,000 hours and 500,000 hours - 17 to 57 years of non-stop service between failures

A variant of the INIT-29 virus was recently discovered, according to an announcement from Professor Gene Spafford at Purdue. The new virus strain, dubbed INIT-29-B, behaves similarly to the original INIT-29, which appeared in late 1988

Our articles on the recent corporate acquisitions and mergers generated numerous comments and a great deal of discussion. writes: I'm sure you will receive various messages commenting on your comments on monopoly in the computer arena and wishing for a model more like that of the entertainment (movie) business

Those of you who read about the Apple/IBM alliance in detail no doubt remember that then-CEO John Sculley proposed that IBM buy Apple outright at one point

This article takes a look at the apparent paucity of female programmers participating in technical computing areas online. We know that women do program on the Macintosh, and some suggest that despite traditional role models and some arguable odds against the possibility for success, women always have numbered among the most brilliant computer analysts, designers, engineers, and authors