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<div class="center_top">Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling <a href="http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/?pt=TB-TAGLINE" style="color:yellow">Take Control</a> ebooks.</div>
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<h5>Author Biography</h5>
<p class="tearoffbox_text"><a href="http://www.tidbits.com/adam/">Adam C. Engst</a> is the publisher of TidBITS and Take Control Books. He has written numerous books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles - thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and now Macworld. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992, the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993, and the Take Control electronic book series. His awards include the MDJ Power 25 ranking as the most influential person in the Macintosh industry outside of Apple every year since 2000, inclusion on the MacTech 25 list of influential people in the Macintosh technical community, and being named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And yes, he has been turned into an action figure.
Want more? <a href="http://twitter.com/adamengst">Follow Adam on Twitter</a> for 140-character musings on a variety of topics.</p><p class="tearoffbox_text_email"><span class="shift_down"><img src="/images/gettb_button_email.gif" height="12" width="12" border="0" alt="Send Email to Author"></span> <a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="document.check_human_6.submit_type.value='email'; document.check_human_6.author_id.value='6'; ShowTipBox('hc_6', 'hc_recaptcha_6', 'cb_item_add')">Email the author</a></p>
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<div style="padding-bottom:35px"><div class="tip_display" style="float:left"><p><br><a href="/tipbits/74">Link to this tip</a></p></div><div class="tip_display" style="float:right; width:150px">
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3748" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3748">The latest discussions on Usenet have focussed on the new Macs, but a number of them have taken an interesting twist. Some think the Mac LC, which won't be available in quantity until early next year, will be Apple's new education computer in that it has decent speed, color support, and a relatively low price tag</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 15 Oct 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3749" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3749">Recently, we've been implementing small changes here and there, making the TidBITS stack a little cleaner and easier to use. In the next week or so though, the true experimentation will start as we test out a different look for the entire interface</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 15 Oct 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3751"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3751', 'show')">New Mac Attack</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3751" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3751">In an effort to compete in the low and mid-range computer market, Apple officially announced three new Macs, the Mac Classic, Mac LC, and Mac IIsi. For those who read the industry press, the announcement had few surprises, but those not up on the details may appreciate a run down of the specifications for these new machines</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 08 Oct 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3752"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3752', 'show')">Shades of Hope & Glory</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3752" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3752">Sometimes priceless news can be found in places where you least expect them. BusinessWeek, Oct 15, has these interesting nuggets (all literal quotes from that issue):
BusinessWeek half-admits that a policy of "licensing portions of Apple's proprietary OS to outside manufacturers, to broaden the Mac market" is being considered</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=6" class="category">Tech News</a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 08 Oct 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3753" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3753">Those of us who engage in sinful activities have become used to paying for them in the form of high taxes. Sin taxes, more commonly known as luxury taxes, bring in revenue from the sale of alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 08 Oct 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3754"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3754', 'show')">Notes & Comments/08-Oct-90</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3754" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3754">We're trying a slightly different format for displaying text in this week's TidBITS. It is designed for online consumption, whereas we've normally stuck with designs meant for paper consumption</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 08 Oct 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3756" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3756">Well, they're at it again, this time in France. Another virus has recently been discovered, though it isn't new. ANTI-B is a slightly different strain of the ANTI virus that despite being discovered almost two years later, appears to be the initial version of ANTI</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 01 Oct 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3757"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3757', 'show')">Boomerang Makes Good</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3757" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3757">One of the most popular shareware utilities of all time has been Hiro Yamamoto's Boomerang. Initially free, Boomerang provides several important functions in the standard Open and Save dialog boxes</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 01 Oct 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3758" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3758">Bored by that ho-hum magnetic storage? Yawning at the speed of the optical drives? Frustrated by the reliability of floppies? Well Canon has something for you</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 01 Oct 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3759" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3759">Sure portable computers are nice. It's fun to just set up wherever you happen to be and work. Unfortunately wherever you happen to be is seldom a good place to set up a machine designed to be placed on a table in a relatively well-lit room while you are sitting on an ergonomically designed chair</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 01 Oct 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3761"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3761', 'show')">More Apple Bits</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3761" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3761">Apple has been busy with System 7.0, TrueType negotiations, HyperCard's transfer to Claris, and the like, but they continue to do interesting things. First off, if you've ever watched a TV show that had a Mac with a color monitor on it, you probably noticed how terrible the monitor looked</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 24 Sep 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3762" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3762">Lately the market for appointment and reminder programs has offered a number of useful programs. In some ways, it's odd that it took so long on the Mac for alarm programs to appear, since they been around on the PC for a long time, dating at least from the introduction of Sidekick, an early do-it-all TSR (terminate stay resident program).The shareware Calendar DA was perhaps the first of these programs, but it had no reminder capabilities, so it was easy to miss appointments</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 24 Sep 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3763" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3763">A few months back Mitch Kapor and others started the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help educate both government employees and the general public to the realities of computer use and abuse</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 24 Sep 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3764"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3764', 'show')">Online Service News</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3764" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3764">We far prefer the pseudo-free (meaning "somebody pays for this but it's not usually me") electronic services such as Usenet or local BBS's to the pay-per-millisecond-of-access-time services like CompuServe</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 24 Sep 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3766"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3766', 'show')">System 7.0 in '91</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3766" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3766">Vaporware has become all too prevalent in this day and age of knee-jerk competition. Announcements are made to get a jump on competitors or to steal competitors' thunder, but the products seldom follow the announcements as closely as we would like</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 17 Sep 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3767"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3767', 'show')">Truth in PostScript</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3767" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3767">Well, the font wars aren't exactly over, but a major flag-waving went on recently when Apple and Adobe reconciled their differences. That's literally all anyone knows because Apple and Adobe announced that they would be working more closely</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 17 Sep 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3768" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3768">I somehow missed the very beginning of this discussion on Usenet, but the topic seemed clear and important enough nonetheless. Apparently several people have had instances in which they believe a SyQuest drive trashed their hard disk (so watch out for roaming SyQuest drives!)</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 17 Sep 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3769" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3769">A reader recently commented that it would be great if we could provide short abstracts with the titles in the distribution files (for those of us who can't sight-read either Binhex or StuffIt format :-))</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 17 Sep 1990</div></div>
<a href="/article/3770"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('3770', 'show')">The next NeXTs</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3770" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3770">Last week, NeXT announced a new line-up of computers, all based on the Motorola 68040 chip. The computers range from the $4995 standard NeXTstation (monochrome display, 8 megabytes of RAM, 105 megabyte hard disk, 2.8 megabyte floppy that also reads and writes DOS disks) to the $29,295 Division Server (monochrome display, 64 megabytes of RAM, two 1.4 gigabyte hard disks)</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 17 Sep 1990</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_3772" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_3772">Two connotations of the above title come to mind. ROM liberation and ROM libraries. Both are apt, because ROMlib is a Unix library that can simulate the Macintosh ROMs, but which might liberate (perhaps not the best choice of words, I suppose) them from Apple</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> | 10 Sep 1990</div></div>
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