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

Paul Durrant and Steve Dobbs note that the slightly smaller screen in the MessagePad 110 is not a problem, as mentioned in TidBITS #218, but in fact an excellent reminder to developers to check for screen size at runtime rather than assuming a certain size

Cliff Miller of Pacific HiTech comments on Info-Mac that they have remastered the Info-Mac 3 CD-ROM to work around a conflict between the premastering software and NEC driver software

Hard drive maker Quantum Corp. has introduced several new lines of drives, including the intriguing Grand Prix 4280 and 2140, which are 4.2 GB and 2.1 GB drives designed for multimedia applications

The short lead time for electronic publications can be fun at times. I added the comment about Novell buying WordPerfect to TidBITS #218 after a friend mentioned it during a phone call around 10:00 PM Monday night

Director of Technical Services, Baka Industries Inc. Global Village Communication, developers of the TelePort and PowerPort modem series, have told us that the GlobalFax software that accompanies their modems is incompatible with the new Power Macs

The browser of choice for TidBITS has long been Easy View, Akif Eyler's simple setext browser for the Macintosh. That's not about to change any time soon, what with Akif's most recent update, Easy View 2.44, and those who enjoy TidBITS but read it on Windows or Unix systems might appreciate new programs that can browse setext files on those platforms. Before I get into the new features and fixes in Easy View, consider some of the features it has long had, including the capability to search for a word or phrase and extract all the matching articles to a text file and the capability to decode the styles used in our setext format (including bold, underline, and separate body and headlines styles, all of which are user-definable)

While the Power Macs capture the public's attention, Apple is hard at work on many other things. Here are a few of them: The $549 Macintosh Application Environment was introduced just after the Power Macs on March 15th

The late-breaking news that we've had no time to digest is that today Novell purchased WordPerfect for a whopping $1.4 billion in stock, creating one of the world's largest software companies

Apologies to Graphisoft Software and Graphsoft, Inc., the publishers of ArchiCAD and MiniCAD, respectively. In our "Power Macintosh Nativeware" article in TidBITS #217 we incorrectly listed both products as being from Graphisoft