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

Boy we're getting to be a pain about all this letter writing, aren't we? OK, we promise to lay off for a while after this one. Remember Apple's petition to the FCC asking that a portion of the radio spectrum be set aside for Data-PCS (Data Personal Communications Service)? Data-PCS provides short range wireless network services and will be vendor-independent, so everyone gets to use it, not just Apple

AccessPC 1.0 Insignia Solutions, Inc. 254 San Geronimo Way Sunnyvale, CA 94086 408/522-7600 408/848-7677 408/733-9541 (fax) D1437, UK0032 at AppleLink Rating: 8 Penguins out of a possible 10 Summary: -- AccessPC is a single purpose utility that sits in the background and allows you to mount MS-DOS disks on the Macintosh desktop (assuming of course, that you have a drive that can read and write MS-DOS disks)

Apple has always boasted of the SuperDrive's ability to read and write both Mac and MS-DOS disks. Apple's propagandizing statements fail to mention that you have to use Apple File Exchange, a relatively obnoxious, Font/DA Mover-like program, to access the MS-DOS files

AccessPC ships on a single disk with five items, only two of which need to be installed by dragging to your System Folder and restarting. Those two items are the "~AccessPC" cdev and its associated document "~AccessPC Data." I presume that the tildes sit in front of the file names to make them sort together, and so that the cdev runs after most other INITs and cdevs

I tested AccessPC with a Kennect Drive 2.4 and Rapport as well as an Apple SuperDrive. Besides those two drives, AccessPC supports an external SuperDrive, the Kennect Drive 360 and Drive 1200, the 3.5" and 5.25" external DaynaFile drives, the PLI TurboFloppy 1.4, and the Outbound Portable with the FDHD-compatible drive

The manual is short but helpful and generally well-written. I didn't notice any errors and Insignia provided a short index. I'm glad Insignia included the Errata sheet, because it explained a few things that the manual glossed over or had changed since Insignia printed the manual

As a matter of fact, I've only had a single problem with AccessPC since I've started using it. It surprised me, because I couldn't figure out why it should have happened

Dave Kosiur writes, "I looked over your last few TidBITS and was taken in by the SentientNET April Fools' joke. However, even though you've now pointed readers towards the DCE stuff for other machines, there's something even closer to home - for Macs

The oldest Mac still in Apple's current product line is the venerable SE/30. When the SE/30 first came out, people quickly became fond of it because of its combination of IIcx power and SE size

Every now and then a scientist or engineer complains about how the Mac is lousy for scientific and engineering applications. That certainly was more true a few years back, before the Mac II and large color monitors, but we hope that the gap is narrowing

Ah, it's spring, the season of the year when a company turns its thoughts to software upgrades. I was going to say "when young companies..." but since the company I have in mind is Microsoft, a relative geezer at 15 years old, it wasn't quite appropriate