TidBITS#300/23-Oct-95
=====================

Our 300th issue begins with news of Performa price drops, changes
   in how to contact Intuit, and where to find out more about the
   Gartner survey detailing how Macs are cheaper to support than
   Windows machines. The bulk of the issue, though, is a celebration
   of our 300th issue - 300 reasons about why the Mac is a great
   machine to use and to write about.

This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* APS Technologies -- 800/443-4199 -- <sales@apstech.com>
   Makers of hard drives, tape drives, and neat SCSI accessories.
   For APS price lists, email: <aps-prices@tidbits.com>
* Northwest Nexus -- 206/455-3505 -- http://www.halcyon.com/
   Providing access to the global Internet. <info@halcyon.com>
* Hayden Books, an imprint of Macmillan Computer Publishing
   Free shipping on orders via the Web -- http://www.mcp.com/
   Mac Tip of the Day & free books! -- http://www.mcp.com/hayden/
* Power Computing -- 800/375-7693 -- <info@powercc.com>
   Now shipping... The Award-Winning First MacOS Compatible!
   See what the press says! http://www.powercc.com/News/quotes.html
* DealBITS: It stays crispy in milk!
   http://king.tidbits.com/dealbits/ -- <dealbits@tidbits.com>

Copyright 1990-1995 Adam & Tonya Engst. Details at end of issue.
   Information: <info@tidbits.com> Comments: <editors@tidbits.com>
   ---------------------------------------------------------------

Topics:
    MailBITS/23-Oct-95
    300 Reasons the Mac is Great
    Reviews/23-Oct-95

ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/issues/1995/TidBITS#300_23-Oct-95.etx


MailBITS/23-Oct-95
------------------

**A New Performa & New Performa Pricing** -- In anticipation of
  the holiday buying season, Apple last week announced Performa
  price reductions of up to $500. The biggest drop hit the Performa
  6220CD, which now starts at about $2,000 for 16 MB of RAM, a
  quad-speed CD-ROM, a 1 GB hard disk, plus a modem, TV tuner, and
  software bundle. Apple also announced the Performa 6300CD,
  featuring a 100 MHz PowerPC 603e processor with 256K Level 2
  cache, a 28.8 internal modem, a 15-inch monitor with built-in
  speakers, 16 MB of RAM and a 1.2 GB hard disk. The Performa 6300CD
  will debut at the high end of the Performa line, starting around
  $2,800. [GD]


**Intuit Phone and Email Correction** -- While Steven Becker wrote
  the article on Quicken 6.0 in TidBITS-299_, I called Intuit to ask
  what phone numbers and email address they'd prefer to have
  included. After passing me to four different people, Intuit
  finally gave me what turned out to be incorrect information:
  apparently the email address was dedicated to MacInTax (another
  Intuit product) and the phone numbers were sometimes answered by
  Intuit, then other times by a dock worker somewhere in California.
  So, here's Intuit's latest version of their preferred contact
  information for questions or information on Quicken. Keep your
  fingers crossed. Intuit -- 800/624-8742 -- 415/322-0573 --
  <72662.2715@compuserve.com> [GD]


**Gartner Report Followup** -- Many TidBITS readers wrote to ask
  where they can get their hands on the report from Gartner Group
  Consulting Services that found Macs cheaper to support than
  Windows machines (see TidBITS-299_). Apple apparently may not be
  able to make the report available online (the rights are owned by
  the Gartner Group), but Apple has set up an automatic voice mail
  system at 800/232-9335 to take requests for physical copies of the
  report. Apple is working on ways to get the report to folks in
  countries besides the U.S. and Canada - stay tuned. [GD]


**A Cure For Netscape Freezes?** Frustrated that Netscape
  Navigator kept freezing on his Quadra 605, Scott Sykes
  <ssykes@cygnus.rsabbs.com> rolled up his sleeves and tried to
  figure out what the problem might be. The result is Netscape
  Defrost, a simple system extension that patches a Mac Toolbox call
  designed to return information about the machine's physical
  location on the globe. (You can access and set this information
  through the Map control panel.) Essentially, Netscape Defrost
  checks this data once, then passes that cached information back to
  any application that might be looking for it. Though I can't
  personally vouch for it, Scott certainly has a number of satisfied
  customers. Netscape Defrost is donation-ware and is designed to
  work with all versions of Netscape. [GD]

ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/comm/tcp/netscape-defrost-09b1.hqx
ftp://cygnus.rsabbs.com//ssykes/nsdefrost.sit.hqx
http://cygnus.rsabbs.com/~ssykes/nsdefrost.html


300 Reasons the Mac is Great
----------------------------
  by TidBITS Editors and Friends

  We wanted to do something a bit out of the ordinary as a
  celebration for our 300th issue. Eventually, we decided the best
  way to celebrate TidBITS would be to celebrate the machine that
  has given us our inspiration for the last five and a half years -
  the Macintosh.

  With the help of some friends, we came up with 300 reasons why the
  Mac has made it to where it is today. Apple may have its problems,
  but the company still managed to ship 1.02 million Macs in the
  second quarter of 1995.

  We don't pretend that the 300 entries below are complete, and
  we're sure there are some egregious omissions. We're only human,
  and we don't intend the list to be exhaustive or exhausting to
  research. As such, please don't send us your personal list of
  reasons why the Mac is great, your line-by-line analysis of our
  list, things you think we left out, or things you're offended we
  included. This is a one-shot deal, and we already get plenty of
  mail.

  We wish to thank our friends who helped create this list,
  including:

* John Baxter
* Glenn Fleishman
* Ric Ford
* Cary Lu
* Chad Magendanz
* Kee Nethery and Kirsten
* Matt Neuburg
* Erik Speckman


**Can't Get Enough?** Before we get on to the 300 reasons, we
  wanted to pass on a related note. If you just love reading this
  sort of Macintosh propaganda, you'll love Apple Fellow Guy
  Kawasaki's <kawasaki@eworld.com> new mailing list. It's one-way
  only, so you don't have to worry about long, drawn-out flame wars.
  Instead, you get to read great things Guy sends out about Apple.
  Guy, acting as self-proclaimed "List Pope," writes:

  Attention: raging, inexorable Macintosh evangelists! Want to help
  people buy the right platform and defeat the hegemony that seeks
  to dominate us all? I've created a mailing list for evangelists of
  the Macintosh Way.

  If you join this list, you'll get sporadic, but interesting,
  postings such as press releases, announcements, and special offers
  to help the Macintosh cause. This is a one-to-many list, so your
  mailbox won't be cluttered with chozzerai. To join, send an email
  message to <macway-request@abs.apple.com>. The server will respond
  with information about subscribing.


**Great Software**

* About This Macintosh tells you your system version, how much
  memory is available and how much memory is being used, and it's
  built right into the Finder.

* "Aliases that work, as opposed to Shortcuts that don't." -Cary

* Apple Guide. Interactive, contextual help built into the system
  is a great thing.

* "You can talk people through the Macintosh on the phone,
  including your parents - I did this the other night with my 
  dad." -Glenn

* An organized, hierarchical system folder, rather than a flat
  mess of cryptically-named files.

* Apple File Exchange

* A/UX. Even if it never made native mode on the Power Macs, A/UX
  has strong supporters and gave Apple a much-needed additional
  operating system for some markets.

* "Because when you copy a file onto your hard drive, you don't
  have to create an icon, and then type in the full path name of
  your file, and then type the full path name of it's application,
  in order to be able to click on it and make it run." -Kirsten

* The Palette Manager provided the first consistent (or semi-
  consistent) color model.

* Cut, Copy and Paste/the Clipboard. Let's not forget the simple
  stuff - the Mac was the first personal computer to make the power
  of Cut, Copy, and Paste immediately accessible. Further, data that
  was cut or copied could be moved between applications, even in the
  old days.

* Customizable icons. Just paste into the Get Info dialog box.

* Drag and drop system extensions. To add functionality to your
  Mac, you just drag the components to your System Folder, drop them
  there, and let the machine sort it out. There's no messing with
  configuration or initialization files, interrupts or memory
  locations, and no comparable mechanism exists for other computing
  platforms.

* Disk First Aid. Apple has shipped basic, friendly disk
  diagnostic software with every Mac since System 6.

* First computer on which you virtual desktop could be as messy as
  your real desktop.

* Few viruses. Though Macintosh viruses exist, they don't compare
  to the sheer volume and malevolence of viruses in the DOS/Windows
  world.

* Graphing Calculator. What a cool demo.

* HyperCard. HyperCard might not have brought programming to the
  masses the way Bill Atkinson intended, but HyperCard virtually
  defined "authoring software" and still serves as a crucial tool
  for educators, programmers, and others (including us).

* Key Caps. You don't have to type weird codes to get upper-ASCII
  special characters.

* Long file names on CD-ROMs (Windows CD-ROMs use the ISO 9660
  format which is limited to eight character file names, even with
  Windows 95.)

* Long file names since 1984.

* Macintosh Drag & Drop

* MacPaint. A classic program that successfully captured the
  essence of the Mac's superiority.

* Macs are secure Internet servers.

* MacsBug

* MiniFinder

* MPW. The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop might not be as popular
  now in the wake of THINK C and CodeWarrior, but the value of a
  sophisticated and powerful development environments from Apple
  can't be overlooked. In addition, the MPW Shell is still an
  incredibly useful bit of software.

* MultiFinder. Although MultiFinder leaves a number of annoying
  technical legacies in the Mac system, perhaps no other piece of
  system software better demonstrated the advantages of being a Mac
  power user before System 7 came out.

* Multiple monitors with a contiguous, extended desktop (or
  mirroring on PowerBooks). Nothing beats a multiple monitor setup.

* Multiple, selectable boot drives. They make testing,
  troubleshooting, and recovery far easier.

* Non-segmented memory. "You never need to understand or cope with
  the 'lower 640K' or irritating differences between extended and
  expanded memory." -Tonya

* One (and only one) menubar.

* Open Scripting Architecture. Mix-and-match system-level support
  for inter-application scripting, including third-party products.

* Personal File Sharing. We might take it for granted now, but the
  idea that any machine on a network could be a file server was
  virtually unheard of until System 7 debuted. Personal File Sharing
  is now so integral to the way many people use their Macs that they
  don't know what AppleShare is.

* QuickDraw. Xerox hadn't figured out overlapping graphic regions,
  but they faked it well enough that Apple thought they had and
  reverse-engineered something that didn't exist.

* QuickDraw 3D

* QuickDraw GX

* QuickTime. No one thought about digital video until QuickTime
  appeared - now people can't get enough of it.

* QuickTime VR. The demos contain all the convincing anyone needs.

* Real-time, system-wide speech recognition.

* Resource forks. "When you come to a fork in the road, open it
  with ResEdit." -Adam

* Scientific applications like LabView started on the Mac, and the
  Mac has always been a popular machine for research and
  visualization applications. (NIH Image is a great example.)

* Standardized handling and management of fonts. Fonts live in the
  Fonts folder. Imagine that.

* Support for monochrome systems. The original Macs were black and
  white, and modern system software still provides excellent support
  for monochrome systems and monitors. A color display is not
  required, ideal for people who prefer monochrome.

* The active System Folder has a special icon that appears
  automatically. If you have multiple systems installed on other
  platforms, determining which one is running is never as
  straightforward.

* The first machine that could have a Font menu so long it would
  drop through your floor.

* The CD+G format (CD audio plus graphics) only works on the Mac.

* TrueType. It forced Adobe to release the PostScript font format
  and provided built-in, scalable font choices for normal users.

* User-configurable Apple Menu.

* WorldScript. We may speak and write English here at TidBITS, but
  a vast number of people in the world don't.

* You can run a Mac from RAM disk.

* You don't have to know what a pathname is.

* The Zoom box, especially in the Finder.


**Great Hardware**

* The original ImageWriter.

* "Impromptu LocalTalk networks at 30,000 feet." -Adam

* "Because you can run a LocalTalk network (230.4 Kbps) from
  building to building using the connecting hot and cold water pipes
  as the two wire network connection." -Kee

* A IIci, introduced in September 1989 and shipping until February
  1993, is _still_ an adequate machine.

* A single port for all keyboards and pointing devices.

* AAUI: a lower cost of entry to get into different flavors of
  Ethernet.

* "All Macs have those great little icons over the ports." -Tonya

* Almost no IRQ conflicts. [We say "almost" because our friend
  Cary Lu has run into an utterly obscure one. But given time, Cary
  will encounter _anything_ - we have a pool going for when he finds
  Elvis. Easy money. -Geoff]

* Apple's R&D budget, which gives us cool new toys.

* Automatic inject and eject floppy drives.

* AV capabilities. "You can just plug in your video camera!"
  -Tonya

* Booting from CD-ROM.

* Built-in Ethernet.

* Built-in sound, with no need to install, configure, or
  troubleshoot a "SoundWhacker" card.

* DOS Cards. If you can't beat 'em, beat 'em at their own game.

* Great Machine: PowerBook 100: It's cheap, light, surprisingly
  spritely, and has the best RAM disk capabilities of any PowerBook.

* Great Machine: SE/30: In many cases, the SE/30 is still the
  cheapest server workhorse of choice. No, we're not parting with
  ours come hell or high water.

* Great Machine: The LC III: "A reasonably powerful, full-featured
  Mac you can hide in a pizza box." -Geoff

* Have we mentioned multiple monitors?

* MacRecorder

* Memory expansion doesn't require any software configuration.

* Multiple hard drives with no extra hardware.

* The original LaserWriter. Even at $7,000, this machine gave
  birth to desktop publishing as much as anything else.

* PhoneNet. Simple, inexpensive networks exist most places there
  are multiple Macs.

* Plug-and-play external floppy drives.

* Plug-and-play hard disk installation - plug it in and turn 
  it on.

* Plug-and-play networking with a simple serial cable.

* Power key on the keyboard where you can reach it really easily.

* PowerBook Duo: "Perfect for petite people with small hands who
  don't have strong shoulders." -Tonya

* PowerBook SCSI Mode - _all_ PowerBooks should do this!

* PowerBooks. The first laptops to feature palm rests and an
  integrated trackball; in many senses the laptop industry _still_
  hasn't caught up.

* Relatively standardized batteries for PowerBooks. "In the PC
  world on manufacturer can ship laptops using dozens of different
  battery types." -Cary

* Removing floppy disks with a straightened paper clip. (Did you
  ever wonder what the small hole on the right side of floppy drives
  was for?)

* RISC. Gotta love that speed.

* Small, convenient connectors for printers and modems.

* Switching monitor resolutions on the fly, without quitting or
  restarting.

* The Chimes of Death. Even the most naive Mac user knows
  something is wrong when their cheery startup sound changes to
  something less reassuring.

* The fact that even the elderly Mac Plus can run much of today's
  software. [This was somewhat debated, but Macs do tend to have
  long, useful lives - much longer than many other platforms. 
  -Tonya]

* The simplicity and elegance of a one-button mouse. "It's hard to
  hit the wrong button." -Adam

* Trackpad. The center-mounted trackball was a great advance in
  the first PowerBooks, and Apple managed to go one better with the
  trackpad.

* Transition to PowerPC. No other computing platform has attempted
  such a dramatic shift in its hardware architecture, let alone
  accomplished it so smoothly.

* VideoSpigot

* Virtually every connector on a Macintosh is unique, so it's hard
  to plug something into the wrong port.

* Virtually every machine now has built-in video, audio, and
  networking.

* You can plug your mouse right into the keyboard.

* PowerBooks (and now some Power Macs) can be put to sleep rather
  than being completely shut down.


**Great Tradition**

* "Andy Warhol did a version of the logo!" -Glenn

* "The corporate name is shared with the Beatles." -John

* Andy Ihnatko and his MacAquarium.

* Apple's surprisingly good Internet presence.

* The Apple Tech Info Library, now searchable and online.

http://til.info.apple.com/til/til.html

* "Because you could get feet that would raise up your Mac Plus so
  that your computer looked like a small robot." -Kee

* Clarus the Dogcow. Just say moof.

* Cool six-color logo.

* Cool codenames for machines.

* Desktop publishing. With PageMaker, other early programs, and
  the LaserWriter, the Mac gave birth to a multi-billion dollar
  industry.

* Early Macintosh SEs had the signatures of the engineering team
  inside the case.

* Educational discounts. "When you were in college you could get
  your Mac for half off - now everyone can get them for that price,
  so you should fill you business with them!" -Erik

* First completely standardized bitmap display.

* First human interface guide. Apple was the first to take human
  interface seriously enough to teach its developers how to make
  easy-to-use applications.

* "...and Apple had the first human interface police." -Adam

* Flying Toasters. Frivolous or not, they became big business.

* I'm sure we must have mentioned multiple monitors, but if not...

* Image editing - Photoshop appeared first on the Mac and
  virtually gave birth to the digital image industry.

* Info-Mac and University of Michigan archive sites for Macintosh
  files on the Internet

* _Inside_Macintosh_

* MacHack. 96 hours of no sleep and lots of cool code.

* Multimedia. What we call "multimedia" today was largely born on
  the Macintosh, and the Mac remains the dominant development and
  authoring platform.

* Outstanding Shareware Community. No other computing platform can
  boast a shareware community of such high quality and consistency.

* Some Macintosh models have excellent Easter Eggs. The SE/30 has
  an Engineer Hall of Fame burned in its ROMs; the Mac SE, IIci, and
  IIfx have pictures of the development team buried inside. Want
  more?

ftp://mirror.aol.com//pub/info-mac/info/apple-easter-eggs-135.hqx

* Super high-end color scanners work _only_ with Macs.

* The "Lemmings" commercial.

* The Chicago font. Perhaps nothing so illustrates the permeation
  of the Macintosh as the ubiquitous presence of Chicago on signs,
  billboards, televisions, movies, album covers, and books. It's
  everywhere - a subliminal Sign of Macintosh.

* The classic "1984" commercial.

* The Clinton White House runs on PowerBooks.

* The Mac pioneered use of 3.5-inch disks.

* The Mac Classic could boot from _ROM_. Neat.

* "The power to crush the other kids."

* The San Francisco font. In the early days, this crazy bitmapped
  font best demonstrated the power of the Macintosh for many people.
  "Sure, you can print a note on _your_ computer, but can you print
  a _ransom_ note?"

* The system software was _free_ for many years.

* The World Wide Developers Conferences (WWDC)

* Two words: Icon Garden. (If you get the QuickTime VR Player, you
  can even check out a QTVR movie of it.)

http://qtvr.quicktime.apple.com/InMac.htm
http://quicktime.apple.com/archive/applicon.mov
http://www.sri.com/~bergstrm/library/apple.html

* WYSIWYG

* Xerox PARC

* "You can safely give a Mac to your grandmother, and I have." -Adam

* You could put the system, a word processor, a graphics program,
  and your files on one 400K floppy disk. That was a while ago, 
  but still...


**Great Companies**

* Adobe Systems. Thanks for PostScript.

* Aladdin. Shareware can work.

* Aldus. PageMaker ruled the DTP world for a long time.

* America Online. Originally AppleLink Personal Edition, and
  heavily Mac-oriented for years.

* APS Technologies.

* Asante Technologies

* Casady & Greene

* Connectix

* Dantz Development. It's 1:00 AM. Have you backed up your hard
  disk today?

* Delta Tao Software. Small, quirky, and with a serious attitude.

* Farallon

* MacConnection. They defined excellence in mail order and
  originated cheap overnight shipping plus use of environmentally
  sensitive packing.

* Maxis

* Metrowerks. They came out of the woodwork to save Apple for
  developers.

* Now Software

* Peachpit Press

* Radius

* StarNine. For years a minor email gateway developer, StarNine
  exploded on the scene with WebSTAR and ListSTAR.

* Voyager Company


**Great People**

* Alan Kay

* AMUG

* Andrew Welch and Ambrosia Software.

* Andy Hertzfeld

* BCS*Mac

* Bill Atkinson

* Bill Gates, despite the best efforts of some of his employees.

* Bill Goodman

* BMUG

* Bruce Horn

* Bruce Tognazzini

* Burrell Smith

* Charlie Jackson

* Chuck Shotton, for MacHTTP and its successor, WebSTAR. Macs can
  too be great Internet servers.

* Chuq Von Rospach, who coordinated the split of the original
  <comp.sys.mac> newsgroup and started the Apple Internet family of
  mailing lists.

* Dartmouth College's development team

* Dave Winer

* Don Norman

* Frederic Rinaldi, for XCMDs and XFCNs galore.

* Garry Hornbuckle, who brought MacTCP out of the forest of bugs
  and is helping Apple move past it to Open Transport.

* Guy Kawasaki

* Jef Raskin, an often-forgotten reason for the original
  Macintosh's existence.

* John Norstad

* John Warnock

* Kai Krause

* Kevin Calhoun

* Leonard Rosenthol

* Mike Markkula

* Paul Brainerd

* Peter Hoddie

* Peter Lewis. More proof that shareware works.

* Quinn. It's his last name, actually.

* Randy Wigginton

* Ray Lau

* Robin Williams (The author, not the comedian.)

* Steve Capps

* Steve Dorner

* Steve Jobs. Love him or hate him (or both), he's the main reason
  the Mac is what it is today.

* Susan Kare


**Great Learning Experiences**

* Apple's hardware sales forecasting.

* Apple's 12" Color Monitor. Designed to be a smaller, less-
  expensive alternative to the classic Apple 13" color monitor,
  these 512 by 384-pixel monitors from Toshiba were... cheap.

* Apple's 8*24GC video card. That huge processor chip at the end
  sure _looks_ impressive, huh?

* Apple Express Modem

* Apple FaxModem

* AppleLink pricing. At $39 an hour, AppleLink could be considered
  blackmail rather than a service.

* The Chooser. Opening this is like having a flashback to 1988.

* Comments in Get Info. What's the point of providing a field
  where comments about a file can be entered if they're lost when
  the desktop is rebuilt?

* PowerBook Duo keyboards - the series started at A, is now up 
  to F, and they just can't seem to get it right.

* Ejecting disks by dragging them to the Trash. It's not the only
  way to get a disk off the desktop, but it's the one that makes the
  least sense.

* Font/DA Mover

* Macintosh IIvx. If buyers of this replacement for the IIci
  weren't burned by its price or its rapid succession by the Centris
  650, they _were_ burned by the 16-bit system bus which hobbled the
  machine's potential performance.

* ImageWriter LQ

* Jasmine & Ehman

* Mac Portable, er, Luggable. These machines featured an active-
  matrix LCD screen and a trackball, but you could put a nuclear
  device into a smaller box that weighed less. Sony's repackaging of
  this machine as the PowerBook 100 only served to highlight the
  Portable's significant shortcomings.

* Macintosh software from Lotus, especially Jazz.

* Normal use of Balloon Help. Well-implemented and well-written
  balloon help can be a great thing (like Eudora's or Nisus
  Writer's), but typical balloon help - if it's there at all -
  merely serves to annoy as it slowly tells you what you already
  knew.

* Apple's Performa naming scheme. Do you know the difference
  between a Performa 475 and 476, or the Performa 575, 577, and 578?

* Open Transport 1.0. Hardware drives software, and Apple's
  engineers couldn't avoid shipping 1.0 when the Power Mac 9500 
  came out.

* PowerTalk. Integrating multi-service email, address books, and
  digital signatures into the desktop would be a good idea... if it
  had a comprehensible interface and actually worked.

* A power button right below the floppy drive on the
  Centris/Quadra 610/Power Mac 6100-based models, which many users
  accidently press to eject a floppy disk.

* QuickDraw GX. An amazing technology that responds to many long-
  standing problems, but high system requirements and lack of
  developer support make few reasons to use that technology.

* Steve Jobs

* John Sculley

* Numbering System Enablers, with no clue as to what models or
  machines they might be used for.

* The need for products like Conflict Catcher.

* The original 90-day Macintosh warranty.

* The way error messages often ask if serious problems are OK.

* The HindenBook, er, PowerBook 5300.


**Great Products**

* First version of Now Utilities.

* 4D

* Adobe Photoshop

* After Dark

* Anarchie

* AppleTalk Remote Access.

* BBEdit

* ClarisWorks.

* Color publishing software. The Mac was the first computer to do
  professional color publishing, and remains the computer of choice.

* Conflict Catcher

* Continuum, which was a blazingly fast arcade game even on a Mac
  512K.

* Dark Castle

* DaynaFile

* DeBabelizer

* Disinfectant

* Eudora

* FEdit. It was a great disk editor in the early days.

* Fetch

* FileMaker Pro

* FirstClass, TeleFinder, and NovaLink Professional, which brought
  graphical interfaces to the crude command-line bulletin board
  world.

* Frontier

* FutureBASIC

* The Grouch extension that would have Oscar the Grouch sing a
  song when you emptied the trash.

* FreeHand

* Illustrator

* Internet Config

* ListSTAR

* MacDraw. The first object-oriented drawing program available on
  a personal computer.

* MachTen

* Macintosh BASIC. "The first program that was cancelled because
  they decided that everyone who would ever buy it had already
  pirated a copy." -Cary

* MacTCP

* MacTools

* Mathematica

* Metrowerks' CodeWarrior

* MODE32. Though Apple eventually released a flaky system enabler
  to let older Macs address more than 13 MB of RAM, Connectix was
  there with the bullet-proof MODE32 as soon as 32-bit addressing
  became an issue.

* MYST

* NetBunny

* NewsWatcher

* Nisus Writer

* Norton Utilities

* Now Up-to-Date and Now Contact.

* outSPOKEN from Berkeley Systems, which made the Mac more
  accessible to the visually-impaired.

* PageMaker

* Fractal Design Painter

* PlainTalk

* PostScript drove the Mac and the Mac drove it

* Premiere

* QuickCam

* Quicken

* QuicKeys

* RAM Doubler. What a stunning hack.

* Red Ryder

* ResEdit

* Retrospect

* Screen savers that are bigger than applications.

* SimCity. "My all-time favorite game." -Tonya

* SoundMaster. Macs were the first machine to scream when you shut
  them down.

* Spaceward Ho!

* Spectre

* StuffIt

* Super Boomerang. "It's the utility I miss the most when using
  other people's machines." -Adam

* Switcher. An early, effective attempt at MultiFinder.

* SuperPaint. The first combination draw-and-paint application.

* Timbuktu

* _The_Little_Mac_Book_

* _The_Mac_Bible_

* _The_Mac_is_Not_a_Typewriter_

* The Talking Moose and MacInTalk.

* THINK C & Pascal and their LightSpeed predecessors

* ThunderScan. It turned your ImageWriter into a scanner - what a
  funky idea!

* TOPS. Early cross-platform peer-to-peer networking software.

* VersaTerm

* WebSTAR

* WriteNow

**Last But Not Least...**

* TidBITS readers (Maybe we're biased on this one... hmm.)


Reviews/23-Oct-95
-----------------

* MacWEEK -- 16-Oct-95, Vol. 9, #41
    HP DeskJet 1600CM -- pg. 29
    ArcView 2.1 -- pg. 29
    Cumulus 2.5 -- pg. 32
    QX-Tools 1.0 -- pg. 36
    Epson ES-1000C -- pg. 36


$$

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