You can be singing the Beatles' Apple Corp. song to Apple Computer with their new toll-free helpline. However, you can't call them to complain that your Mac insists that your favorite floppy disk is damaged when it looks fine to you
Windows 3.0 is nice if you use a PC-clone, but it is a tad hardware hungry. Reports indicate that a nice Windows platform is a 25 MHz 80386 machine with color VGA and 4 meg of memory
The latest discussions on Usenet have focussed on the new Macs, but a number of them have taken an interesting twist. Some think the Mac LC, which won't be available in quantity until early next year, will be Apple's new education computer in that it has decent speed, color support, and a relatively low price tag
Recently, we've been implementing small changes here and there, making the TidBITS stack a little cleaner and easier to use. In the next week or so though, the true experimentation will start as we test out a different look for the entire interface
In an effort to compete in the low and mid-range computer market, Apple officially announced three new Macs, the Mac Classic, Mac LC, and Mac IIsi. For those who read the industry press, the announcement had few surprises, but those not up on the details may appreciate a run down of the specifications for these new machines
Sometimes priceless news can be found in places where you least expect them. BusinessWeek, Oct 15, has these interesting nuggets (all literal quotes from that issue):
BusinessWeek half-admits that a policy of "licensing portions of Apple's proprietary OS to outside manufacturers, to broaden the Mac market" is being considered
Those of us who engage in sinful activities have become used to paying for them in the form of high taxes. Sin taxes, more commonly known as luxury taxes, bring in revenue from the sale of alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline
We're trying a slightly different format for displaying text in this week's TidBITS. It is designed for online consumption, whereas we've normally stuck with designs meant for paper consumption
Well, they're at it again, this time in France. Another virus has recently been discovered, though it isn't new. ANTI-B is a slightly different strain of the ANTI virus that despite being discovered almost two years later, appears to be the initial version of ANTI
One of the most popular shareware utilities of all time has been Hiro Yamamoto's Boomerang. Initially free, Boomerang provides several important functions in the standard Open and Save dialog boxes
Bored by that ho-hum magnetic storage? Yawning at the speed of the optical drives? Frustrated by the reliability of floppies? Well Canon has something for you
Sure portable computers are nice. It's fun to just set up wherever you happen to be and work. Unfortunately wherever you happen to be is seldom a good place to set up a machine designed to be placed on a table in a relatively well-lit room while you are sitting on an ergonomically designed chair
Apple has been busy with System 7.0, TrueType negotiations, HyperCard's transfer to Claris, and the like, but they continue to do interesting things. First off, if you've ever watched a TV show that had a Mac with a color monitor on it, you probably noticed how terrible the monitor looked
Lately the market for appointment and reminder programs has offered a number of useful programs. In some ways, it's odd that it took so long on the Mac for alarm programs to appear, since they been around on the PC for a long time, dating at least from the introduction of Sidekick, an early do-it-all TSR (terminate stay resident program).
The shareware Calendar DA was perhaps the first of these programs, but it had no reminder capabilities, so it was easy to miss appointments
A few months back Mitch Kapor and others started the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help educate both government employees and the general public to the realities of computer use and abuse