Adam and Tonya and their cats are busy moving this week! So that they can concentrate on finding a new place to live in the Redmond, WA area, settle into new surroundings and new jobs, and relax a little, I've volunteered to be your Guest Editor for a few weeks. Who am I? I'm Mark H. Anbinder, of STARNET's Memory Alpha BBS.

For the next few weeks, any correspondence and information for TidBITS should be sent to one of my electronic or paper addresses, shown on the About TidBITS page of this issue. When Adam and Tonya take over TidBITS again, they will be providing new addresses that we can use to reach them.

Attentive reader Bill Dugan noticed a lack of detail in last week's QuickTime article, on the specific subject of the MPC standard. Bill reports that the standard configuration is:

286 processor at 10Mhz or 12Mhz (depending on who you ask)
2 megs of RAM
VGA card with a minimum of 320 x 200 resolution with 256 colors
AdLib or SoundBlaster sound board (or emulators)
CD-ROM drive with transfer rate of 150K/sec

Thanks for the correction, Bill! Readers who want to learn more about QuickTime should check out the September 1991 Macworld, in which Jerry Borrell's column is devoted to the topic. The column is entitled "Why I Love QuickTime: Not just because it's way cool."

Rik Ahlberg also wrote, to let us know that Switch, which was mentioned in the 15-Jul-91 issue of TidBITS, is incompatible with Adobe Illustrator 3.0 under System 7. It apparently causes Illustrator to quit and return to the Finder as soon as its icon appears in the menu bar.

You may remember the controversy surrounding MarketPlace, a pair of products from Lotus that would have provided a variety of information on American households and businesses. The product that contained information about private individuals and households was withdrawn due to the uproar, and the business product was cancelled as well. Recently, though, a new company named MarketPlace Information Corporation was formed by Lotus personnel who didn't want to see their project go down the tubes. They are now shipping MarketPlace Business 1.1, containing marketing data on over seven million U.S. businesses drawn from the Dun's Market Identifiers database. According to the company, there are no plans to release the Households database, which was at the center of the controversy, but this announcement does raise some of the same accuracy issues (it's very difficult to correct information on a CD-ROM) and might lead to increased popularity for this sort of desktop marketing... which could in turn bring us back to the same situation. If MarketPlace doesn't release a households database, someone else might.

Speaking of which, a company calling itself variously "American Business Information" or "Online Information Network" was marketing products at the recent Comdex show along the same lines as MarketPlace. ABI is offering a dialup service whereby, for a $35 subscription fee, $1 per minute, and 17[cts] per name, users can retrieve names from databases of over ten million U.S. and Canadian businesses, or over 4.5 million "high income" families. The same databases will be available on CD-ROM as well.

Information from:
Mark H. Anbinder -- mha@memory.ithaca.ny.us
Bill Dugan -- bdugan@teri.bio.uci.edu
Rik Ahlberg -- fahlberg@rodan.acs.syr.edu
Adam C. Engst -- ace@tidbits.ithaca.ny.us
John G. DeArmond -- jgd@Dixie.Com
MarketPlace Information Corporation -- 617/225-7850
American Business Information -- 402/953-4565