I'm always interested in newer and bigger forms of mass storage, and a number of interesting announcements have come out in the last few months. Probably the storage device that will gain acceptance the fastest is the 88 MB SyQuest drive, which will first appear from PLI, MicroNet, and Mass Microsystems

One of my favorite people to talk to is Ward Bond, president of Infogrip, because he always pushes the envelope of technology. Infogrip makes the BAT chord keyboard, which should show up in the Mac market after they get enough money to pay an industrial designer to snazz it up for picky consumers

As much as it would be a blast, we can't invite the thousands of you to the wedding. Tonya and I are getting married on June 15th, 1991, in a place probably best described as "somewhere in the middle of New York State." The ground rules for the wedding include (a) no one is allowed to wear uncomfortable shoes, and (b) if anyone absolutely has to wear a tie (which isn't encouraged), it had better be a fish tie

Second, I foolishly said something nasty about how MIPS RISC chips weren't used in the mainstream RISC boxes. Bryan Van Vliet and Frank Nagy both corrected me on this one, since both DEC and Silicon Graphics use the MIPS chips and together hold about 23% of the market

After all that work and trouble to get 576 signatures on our letter to Apple, Connectix announced a software patch called MODE32 which lessens the need for new ROMs for the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30

I enjoy taking photographs, but since I'm not independently wealthy, I can't afford the cost of processing tons of pictures, much less the cost of some of the equipment I'd like

Despite being essentially boring technology (ooo, I can just tell some people aren't going to like that one), CD applications are taking off. First there's Kodak's PhotoCD system for storing pictures, and now along comes Commodore with CDTV

Check out page 4 of the 07-May-91 issue of MacWEEK for the first time I've been quoted by a national magazine. Thanks to Henry Norr for including it. Emery Berger corrects our TechnoBITS article on Iterated Systems's fractal compression board since we blew it and missed the final sentence of the original BYTE article

System system, who's got the system? Apple has a couple of them that you might be interested in, so pay attention. You thought that System 7 was going to be the only System Software released in the next few months, but you weren't counting on 6.0.8

I probably can't sue for the use of my initials, and a group like the Advanced Computer Environment probably wouldn't notice anyway (besides, then I'd have to consort with lawyers :-))

These pseudo-sporadic columns are fun, if only because then I don't have to think of new titles all the time. I'm anticipating a ton of news related to System 7, so this space will collect what's interesting. First off, Dantz was nice enough to send out a free upgrade of Retrospect a few days ago

Compression is a hot field these days, with everyone trying to squeeze the last few bytes from a compressed file. A company called Iterated Systems might top them all though, with its compression board for PC-clones

An anonymous elf writes, "Just as a word of notice, neither DOS Mounter nor the current Access PC work under System 7.0." Gene Spafford writes, though not to us directly, "On March 2nd, thieves stole 3000 computer chips from one of a major computer manufacturer's California locations

When I asked Nisus's version of Webster's Electronic Thesaurus for a definition of "prodigy," it defined a prodigy as something that causes fascinated astonishment or admiration

In the process of receiving over 500 electronic mail messages in support of our letter to Apple asking for a ROM upgrade (it actually asks for a statement of policy regarding the ROM upgrade), I've come across some interesting information on the topic. Connectix, the people who make Virtual and Maxima and are gurus at this sort of thing, are going to release a utility called MODE32