Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers Inc. Last Friday Apple announced a set of software enhancements that improve the performance of a variety of Macintoshes using System 7.1

Connectix seems to continually fix something in the Macintosh system software that Apple should have done right in the first place. Virtual was the first (see TidBITS-160 for details of the latest version), and Connectix has filled Apple's potholes with MODE32 and CPU as well

In the ever-increasing competition for just a little bit more market share, third-party manufacturers and publishers, and the dealers that handle it, have to come up with increasingly creative ways to peddle product lines

Augury of upcoming Apple product introductions is often made easier by the company's tendency to dramatically lower prices shortly before they add new items to the hardware lineup

Even with Easy View, you may find it difficult to find those little tidbits of useful information you know you read in TidBITS. Thanks to a dedicated TidBITS reader, those of us with Internet access now have another option: WAIS. WAIS, which stands for Wide Area Information Servers, is an Internet-based network approach to information retrieval developed jointly by Thinking Machines Corporation, Apple Computer, and Dow Jones

Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers Inc. Months ago, when Apple announced that the StyleWriter printers would be in short supply, some suspected Apple wouldn't manufacture more to meet the unexpected demand because it had a replacement waiting in the wings

Gizmo Technologies has upgraded their ShadowWriter software, which allows people to share "personal" direct-connect printers among computers on a network

Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers Inc. Excited by the chance to have a Unix box with a CD-ROM drive built in? Well, hold your horses..

When gateway vendor Information Electronics announced earlier this year that it was dropping QuickMail add-ons from its product line, the company said it might have one more QuickMail product up its sleeve

Hazy reports surfaced last week that MODE32 was not compatible with System 7.1. Happily, Connectix informs us that the incompatibility exists only in limited circumstances, and most users won't have trouble. MODE32 is the nifty utility, developed by Connectix and licensed by Apple for distribution to all Mac users, that "cleans up" Macs with older, dirty ROMs, allowing these Macs (the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30) to use 32-bit mode, and thus allowing them to address more than 8 MB of RAM or more than 13 MB of virtual memory. According to Connectix CEO Roy McDonald, MODE32 is compatible with System 7.1 unless the Mac is in 32-bit mode AND using virtual memory

One of my colleagues recently showed me a PowerBook 145 whose "About This Macintosh" window claimed it was a PowerBook 140. "And," he said, "over there we've got another 145 that claims to be a PowerBook 170!" Sure enough, the two PowerBook 145s each claimed to be a different machine. When I asked what was going on, a friendly technical support engineer at Apple explained the situation

Macintosh has inspired a strong sense of community among its users, and the Macintosh programming world is no different. Perhaps the best example of this is TopSoft, Inc., a group of programmers who have collaborated for the last several months on some innovative projects, and recently incorporated as a nonprofit entity

Elephants beware! The price of memory is shooting up! This is largely due to a tariff levied on Korean-imported memory chips, such as from Hyundai and Samsung

CE Software announced that one long-standing annoyance for server administrators, incompatibility between CE's QuickMail server software and Apple's AppleShare 3.0 file server software, is a thing of the past

Apple informed dealers this week that some third-party memory expansion cards designed for the PowerBook 140 and 170 models will not fit properly in the just-introduced PowerBook 160 and 180 computers

The three Cornell University students who pleaded guilty last month to charges stemming from the creation and release of the MBDF virus were sentenced last week in Ithaca

Apple has announced that, as of 14-Sep-92, it has begun shipping new Macintosh computers with a run-time "HyperCard 2.1 Player" program in place of the more-functional HyperCard 2.1 software that has shipped with all Macs since last fall

Last Wednesday, Apple requested that owners of some early Macintosh PowerBook 100 computers return the units to the company for a minor modification to the logic board

A nasty rumor has surfaced recently on the nets, claiming that Apple has either discontinued the StyleWriter entirely or has made it exclusively available to the consumer electronics channel

Apple seems to be doing its spring cleaning a little late, removing from its product lists the various obsolete products that have hung around for a while