I love coincidence because it generally means I've got an article for TidBITS. Luckily it seems to happen all the time in this industry. A week or two ago, Tonya got a question about the upper memory limit in the SE/30 versus the IIsi at work, and someone complained to me about SE/30 ROMs in email (can't remember why, offhand), and when I catch up on my Usenet news, I find that a brouhaha has been brewing on the Internet about ROM upgrades

Editor's Note: Below is the final draft of the letter I will be sending to Apple and many of the Macintosh publications. If you support the letter as it stands and desire to be included as a signatory, please send me an email message stating that you support the letter and wish to be included as a signatory

If you've been reading TidBITS carefully, you've noticed the increasing furour over Apple's unclean (32-bit-unclean, that is) ROMs in the Macintosh II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30

For some time after I coordinated the NewROMs petition there was no response at all. Henry Norr of MacWEEK said that he thought the issue was dead until Apple issued a statement, and the only other mention that our letter received came from Bob Cringely of InfoWorld

If we had presses, we'd have to stop them for this story. Apple has dealt with the dirty ROM problem by making a deal with Connectix to distribute MODE32 free of charge (yes, you read that right) to all users