At every good Macworld Expo, people talk about the one hot arrival, an arrival that overshadows everything else, no matter how cool. This year the debutante was Apple's Newton MessagePad

I'll be making the semi-annual pilgrimage to Macworld Boston as you read this. Although I will be ably accompanied by Sally, our PowerBook 100, I won't read email except on CompuServe until 11-Aug-93

Header Quibble - I've noticed a bunch of failures from the fileserver recently, and in most cases, the failure stems from a strange header, most commonly the information in the From: line

Subscribing to TidBITS -- Recently more personal subscription requests have come in as well, so I guess it's time to publish the instructions for subscribing automatically again

Legal Queries -- TidBITS is in the process of researching an article on software licensing with a view toward the actual law, standard agreements, nonstandard agreements, what happens if you break the agreement, and how it all applies to shareware/freeware

We received a number of well thought-out comments abut Roy McDonald's article on software acceleration in TidBITS #186. Although we don't have room for all of them, here are a few notes: Larry Rosenstein and several others disagreed with Roy's statement that "OOP is an obvious formula for inefficient code." Larry felt that this is a myth, pointing at the fact that the System 7 Finder is a new program that hasn't been optimized, in contrast to the System 6 Finder, which had gone through several iterations that would help speed it up

This information will end up in my book, but it's worth mentioning, since it may be of use to you now. AOL now splits long Internet email messages. In the past the America Online gateway software truncated incoming files at 27K, which put a damper on receiving long text files like TidBITS and BinHexed programs

We've come across an intriguing rumor. It might or might not be true, as with all rumors, and I'm sure Claris reserves the right to deny everything or to change its mind, but it appears that all of Claris's major products are doomed in favor of ClarisWorks. That sounds radical and rash, since even the slick ClarisWorks 2.0 doesn't boast anywhere near the stand-alone power of MacWrite Pro, FileMaker Pro, Resolve, or MacDraw Pro

Anyone who runs an unattended server Mac will appreciate a little-known feature of MacsBug 6.2.2. You can define a FirstTime/EveryTime macro that automatically restarts the Mac if it crashes into MacsBug, rather than sitting with an error message on its screen

By the time you read this, Apple will have released the Newton, in the form of the MessagePad, which we talked about in TidBITS #185. Several thousand units will be for sale at the Macworld Expo in Boston, although unless the price to the press is lower than for normal folks, I'm not coming home with one

I need to issue a correction and an apology. There is no way Jesse Helms could be involved with the House of Representatives' pilot project because he is a Senator, not a Representative

The Macintosh LC 520 is sold in Canada, or so writes to tell us. Unlike in the U.S., where Apple currently sells the LC 520 only to the education market, normal people can buy the LC 520 in Canada

Bite the Purple Bullet and buy yourself a bigger PowerBook drive. Along with the cases that various hard drive vendors sell, you can now buy a $99 NuBus card from ETC Peripherals that will accept your 2.5" hard drive (or a 3.5" low-power drive if you buy an optional Purple Bullet Expander)

In the unconfirmed news department, I hear that Apple has finished the Macintosh Hardware System Update 2.0, but that the update is not yet generally available

Fireworks weren't the only thing blowing up on the Fourth of July this year. In Japan the Sumitomo epoxy plant, which made most of the epoxy used in constructing DRAM chips, blew up