TidBITS: TidBITS History

Article 1 of 19 in series

08 Apr 1991 | Print

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TidBITS Survey Introduction

Happy Birthday to us. TidBITS is officially one year old and what better way to celebrate (OK, so we can think of a few) than by reporting the results of our TidBITS SurveyShow full article

Article 2 of 19 in series

20 Apr 1992 | Print

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TidBITS 2.0

by Adam C. Engst

Happy Birthday! This issue marks TidBITS's second anniversary. As you can see, we've put out 120 issues, averaging 60 per year or slightly more than one per weekShow full article

Article 3 of 19 in series

19 Apr 1993 | Print

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TidBITS 3.0

by Adam C. Engst

We don't know how many of you have been with us since TidBITS#001, but those who have might realize that this issue marks the beginning of the fourth year of TidBITSShow full article

Article 4 of 19 in series

18 Apr 1994 | Print

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TidBITS History

by Adam C. Engst

The first issue of TidBITS is dated 16-Apr-90. I sit here, four years later, working on our 222nd issue, and think about all that has changed and all that has remained the sameShow full article

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The first issue of TidBITS is dated 16-Apr-90. I sit here, four years later, working on our 222nd issue, and think about all that has changed and all that has remained the same. Permit me a rambling and decidedly non-sequential recollection.

Tonya deserves credit for the concept for TidBITS. We were living in Ithaca, NY, after having graduated from Cornell University the year before. I was working as an independent consultant, and Tonya had the impressive title of "New Technologies Consultant" in the part of Cornell that sold computers. Unfortunately, Tonya's title translated to "Seller of Macs and DeskWriters," a task which she did along with several others. She thought a weekly newsletter of sorts might help her co-workers keep up on the industry. We figured that we could easily create such a summary, given that we read MacWEEK, PC WEEK, and InfoWorld weekly, and I regularly scanned the nets.

Tonya had an ulterior motive. Her degree from Cornell is in Communications (more appropriate than my double major in Hypertextual Fiction and Classics), and while we were students, she edited the newsletter for the local users group, MUGWUMP. But after passing that on, Tonya felt her skills in PageMaker were rusting away, and thought this newsletter might provide some lubrication, though she was concerned with potential waste of paper.

At the time, I was heavily involved with HyperCard, so my immediate reaction was that we should use the same text to create an electronic HyperCard version to distribute freely on the Internet. And so it was decided, although after only two weeks it became clear that electronic distribution was the way to go; trees would be safe from TidBITS.

You can go back and look at the early issues - I cringe every time I do. We started out summarizing the top stories in the trade rags, but quickly became uncomfortable with the legalities involved. We weren't concerned about copyright, since everything we wrote was in our own words, but there's another legal concept called misappropriation that might or might not have applied. That concern pushed us in the direction of writing our own articles, using the magazines only as sources (which we cited carefully, being good little academics).

The first few weeks of distribution were... interesting. I posted a note on the nets announcing TidBITS and a mailing list for it. I knew how to set up a mailing list on one of Cornell's IBM mainframes, so we stuck with that list for three weeks until it hit about 300 people. It was after the third issue that Tonya got the phone call saying that something with her name on it was crashing Navy computers in California. The Robert Morris Internet worm was still recent history, but a few panicked calls and email messages later, the truth came out. Certain old versions of the BSD mailer used by Unix boxes had a bug that prevented them from dealing properly with headers containing more than several hundred recipients, so when one of these machines received the issue of TidBITS (remember, it was a HyperCard stack, stuffed and BinHexed), that machine bounced the issue back to Cornell's main email computer, which looked at it, saw that there was nothing wrong, and sent it back again, repeating the entire cycle. You can imagine what this did to the Internet, but it all ended well.

We then went looking for alternate methods of distribution. The first people to come through were the net heavies who run major Internet sites to this day. After talking over the issues with them, they allowed us to post TidBITS to the moderated Usenet group comp.sys.mac.digest, which had around 30,000 readers or so back then. Not bad, from 300 to 30,000 in a week, although not all of those people downloaded and defunked each issue to read it in HyperCard.

Around this time we started uploading to the commercial services as well, although I only had an account on America Online, so other people handled redistribution for us. I no longer remember the chronology of when certain people came on, but Dennis Cohen (then, and perhaps still, of Claris) uploaded to CompuServe, Masato Ogawa moved issues to NIFTY-Serve in Japan, Jean-Philippe Nicaise redistributed issues to Calvacom in France, Riza Nur Pacalioglu (who lives in Turkey, making for a roundabout path) and later Eric Apgar of Apple uploaded to AppleLink, and Jay Vollmer and later Randy Simon took care of GEnie. Denise Petersen puts issues on Delphi, and before I was given an account, Larry Loeb and then Paul Raulerson uploaded to BIX for us. These are merely the people whose names rise to the surface of my memory - I cannot count all the folks who have helped spread TidBITS around the networked world of the Internet, commercial services, and BBSes. We owe every one of them a massive debt. Since those early days we've traded accounts for uploading TidBITS each week, and working with Chris Ferino on America Online, Ben Templin and Ric Ford on ZiffNet/Mac, Charlie McCabe and Arwyn Bryant on AppleLink, and Paul Raulerson on BIX, has enabled us to spread TidBITS far and wide.

Right after we started (he's first mentioned in TidBITS #06 and wrote about Macworld Expo in TidBITS #36), Mark Anbinder began writing articles for TidBITS. Mark graduated from Cornell with a degree in Linguistics the same year Tonya and I did, 1989, but went to work for Baka Industries, the main Macintosh dealer in Ithaca. Mark later became the president of MUGWUMP, the local users group, a post he holds to this day. He continues to write for TidBITS frequently and is the only person to whom we've ever given an editorial title. Other regular, though less frequent, contributors have chipped in as well. Matt Neuburg has written extensively on various programs, including a massive 90K review of Nisus, a special issue on the hypertext editor Storyspace, and reviews of several outliners. To close the loop, Matt was my Classics professor at Cornell before ending up in New Zealand, and his Greek Composition class taught me more than any other class in those four years. We've also published a number of articles from Ian Feldman, who created the setext format. The first year of TidBITS I wrote 90 percent of the articles, but that percentage has thankfully been declining, because I never pretend to be an expert on everything, and would far prefer to have someone who is an expert write about what she knows. Oh, if you're wondering, all those who are Pythaeus prefer to remain unnamed - "Pythaeus" is one of the names of Apollo at his oracle at Delphi.

In May of 1991, the world changed. Tonya accepted a job with Microsoft supporting Macintosh Word. We married in June and moved to the Seattle area in July. I had no consulting contacts in Seattle, so I devoted my time to TidBITS and frankly, my Internet contacts kept me sane during those first few difficult months. We realized that although we could live on Tonya's salary, just barely, it would help if TidBITS could bring in some money as well. That's when we came up with the corporate sponsorship program that has resulted in various select companies such as Nisus, Dantz, and APS providing information to interested readers.

Back to the HyperCard stack. One reason I originally used HyperCard was that my stack could merge its contents into another copy of itself, creating a single archive. Information is useless if you cannot find it, and the single stack archive helped solve this problem. Unfortunately, my stack proved equally problematic. Programming quirks caused the archive size to grow too rapidly, but I fixed that after 25 issues. The stack also devoted too much room to background decoration and navigation controls, reducing the text space. After the first few issues, Ian took me to task for the stack, and we started discussing issues surrounding the dissemination of electronic periodicals, and those discussions resulted in Ian creating setext, or structure-enhanced text.

This all took time, and in fact, we published the first 99 issues of TidBITS in HyperCard format. My master archive of all the issues had increased to well over 10 MB, and merging an issue took a long time. It didn't look as though we would have a HyperCard browser for our setext files any time soon as 1991 drew to a close, but I couldn't live with HyperCard any more. TidBITS #100 was our first issue in setext format, and in one of the chronological conjunctions we like so much, it was also the first issue of 1992.

Switching to setext format was terribly important. Every previous issue had to be stuffed and BinHexed before being sent out, forcing everyone to jump through hoops to read it. This limited readership to those who could download to a Mac. Once the issues were in setext format, everyone who subscribed to comp.sys.mac.digest could easily read the issues without additional processing. Currently estimates place comp.sys.mac.digest's readership at about 75,000.

Setext format opened distribution doors in other ways. Alvin Khoo of Simon Fraser University set up a mailing list that garnered over 1,000 subscribers before his home-brewed mailing list software and the SFU machine had trouble with the volume. Luckily, Mark Williamson of Rice University saved the day with the Rice LISTSERV, so we transferred everyone over. The LISTSERV list has grown steadily since the spring of 1992 and now serves about 8,000 people. Also because of the setext format (which looks like plain text but is implicitly structured for decoding by special programs), TidBITS appeared on some Gopher servers and Ephraim Vishniac of Thinking Machines created a WAIS source for it, enabling anyone on the Internet to search the complete text of all issues. A World-Wide Web server is up as well, and I'll announce that officially soon, probably next week.

We still had no browser for setext, though, and no way of creating an archive of all the issues, which was one of my original design goals. I've used a Nisus macro to encode issues since TidBITS #100, but my Nisus macros for decoding setext never worked right. In August of 1992, Akif Eyler released Easy View 2.1 with the capability to browse setext files. Easy View not only had all the features of my simple HyperCard stack, but it could do things like extract all articles that contained a search match. Since Easy View worked on the original setext files, we didn't have to modify our distribution at all, although over the years we've tweaked the format of the issues to make them more attractive for reading in Easy View.

Software reviews were a major step for us. I remember the first time I was sent a commercial program to review, Now Utilities 2.0. Being in poor college-student mode still, I couldn't believe my good fortune and wrote an in-depth review for TidBITS #45. Other products slowly followed suit, including the long-gone Kennect Drive 2.4, and MacInTax back when it still came from SoftView (then purchased by ChipSoft, which recently merged with Intuit). Needless to say, we've looked at many other programs over the years, but I think I'll always have a soft spot for Now Software for that day when Now Utilities 2.0 arrived on my doorstep. It's easiest to talk about products we use regularly, and of all the programs we've used over the years, the constants have been Nisus, uAccess (now UUCP/Connect from InterCon, a full-featured UUCP-based email program), and QuicKeys.

Hardware-wise, we've evolved slowly. The first TidBITS issues were produced on a 4 MB double-floppy SE with a 30 MB home-built hard drive. It eventually transmogrified into an SE/30 with an APS external 105 MB drive and 5 MB, jumping to 8 MB relatively quickly. My strategy was to keep that SE/30 viable, so I added an APS SyQuest drive for backup, a Micron Xceed video card and an Apple 13" color monitor (and since then have refused to use any single-monitor Mac other than a PowerBook). Our second Mac was a Classic with a 40 MB drive that we actually bought for the floppy drive - our SE/30 only had a single 800K internal drive and it was dying. A new SuperDrive was only slightly less than a Classic without a hard drive, although we weren't able to resist the hard drive model. On the whole, the Classic was a mistake - we seldom use it and it's painfully slow. In August of 1992 I jumped the SE/30's memory to 20 MB and adopted my seemingly unusual technique of launching all my standard applications at startup, which makes scheduling easier and simplifies single-key program switching with QuicKeys.

Our third Mac was an extremely cute 8 MB PowerBook 100 with a 20 MB drive that we got during the PowerBook 100 fire sale. I use the PowerBook for most of my serious writing - I wrote some of Internet Starter Kit and all of Internet Explorer Kit on the PowerBook. The hardware purchases that made writing the first book possible were an APS 1.2 GB hard drive and an APS DAT drive for backup - books suck hard disk space and nightly scheduled backups with Retrospect have eased my backup paranoia significantly.

When she started writing her book on Microsoft Word, Tonya bought a Duo 230, which I'm basically forbidden to touch. Eventually, in November of 1993, I broke down and replaced the SE/30 with a Centris 660AV. Tonya snagged my Apple 13" color monitor for double-monitor use on her Duo with a MiniDock, and I switched to the combination of an NEC 3FGx 15" color monitor and an Apple 12" monochrome monitor that I bought used. The only major thing I regret about the 660AV (other than the fact that the speech recognition doesn't really work) is that the Curtis MVP Mouse trackball and footswitch that I used stopped working. I've switched to a Kensington TurboMouse trackball but still miss the footswitch.

The pointing devices remind me of perhaps the worst problem we've faced and continue deal with daily. In early 1992, Tonya injured herself and ended up with tendinitis in her hands and arms. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, which has similar symptoms. We were pretty pitiful for a few months, wearing wrist braces in bed and to go grocery shopping, but we've gradually recovered. The most important factor in our recovery was the realization that a repetitive stress injury is related to extreme amounts of stress that must be reduced. In addition, these silly lycra gloves called Handeze Gloves have made an incredible difference for both of us.

I could ramble for a lot longer, and if I went back and read through my outgoing mail I might remember even more of the stories that make up our history. But what's important about TidBITS is people - the people who have redistributed issues, the people who have contributed articles, the people who have read the issues, and the people who believed in us for years before electronic publishing was conceivable to most publishers. I've always said that I write to the person behind the personal computer, and as my interests lean more and more toward the Internet, I believe all the more in the importance of the individual. This is why we avoid corporate-speak and distribute TidBITS for free. It's worked for four years and 222 issues and although I never predict anything more than a year or so in the future, another four years seems no more inconceivable than the first four were.

Article 5 of 19 in series

17 Apr 1995 | Print

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TidBITS 5.0

by Adam C. Engst

This issue marks the fifth year of TidBITS, making it one of the oldest edited electronic publications on the Internet. We have survived 273 issues, a format change from HyperCard to setext at TidBITS-100, the rise of the World-Wide Web, and the inevitable burnout that Tonya and Geoff have helped eliminate from what is no longer a one-person jobShow full article

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This issue marks the fifth year of TidBITS, making it one of the oldest edited electronic publications on the Internet. We have survived 273 issues, a format change from HyperCard to setext at TidBITS-100, the rise of the World-Wide Web, and the inevitable burnout that Tonya and Geoff have helped eliminate from what is no longer a one-person job. If you're wondering about the history behind TidBITS, check out the article I wrote about it for our fourth anniversary in TidBITS-222.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/pages/TidBITS/issues/ TidBITS-222.html

I think our five years and 273 issues, along with the estimated 150,000 people who read TidBITS, show that what we're doing is valid (despite paper publication naysayers), valuable (to our readers), and viable (Macs, modems, and managing editors don't grow on trees, you know). Although we, unlike many publications, refrain from publishing the self-serving congratulatory letters we receive that compare TidBITS to sliced bread, every now and then it feels good to revel in public for a moment.

There's no telling how many people have read our first issue by now (and it's suitably embarrassing whenever I go back and look it), but I think it's safe to say that only a few hundred read it that fateful week in 1990. Our circulation has grown with the Internet, and the TidBITS mailing list ranks as the third largest LISTSERV-based list with (as of today) 20,237 readers (thanks to Rice University!). When you add the estimated 110,000 people who read <comp.sys.mac.digest>, the several thousand who read TidBITS on the Web at Dartmouth and the thousands who get TidBITS from BBSs and the various commercial services (oddly enough, download counts on the commercial services remain relatively constant), you end up with a large group of people.

http://www.tile.net/tile/listserv/index.html
ftp://ftp.uu.net//usenet/news.lists/USENET_ Readership_report_for_Jan_95.Z

Along with our burgeoning readership, TidBITS has received recognition in a number of more traditional ways, included extremely nice mentions in recent issues of MacUser and Macworld, thanks to Andy Ihnatko and David Pogue. TidBITS has also received several BMUG Choice Product awards in the Online Magazine category - awards that are very complimentary given BMUG's overall high standards. We even made the mainstream press with a small mention in Newsweek in August of 1994.

Sometimes, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, and although numerous electronic publications have come and gone (it's not as easy as it looks), a number of publications (see the URL below) seem to have arrived for good. One such publication, Mac*Chat, even comes out weekly and uses the setext format.

ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/per/

All I can say is, thank you, everyone.

What are our plans for the future? That's a good question, and not one for which we have a ready answer. The overall idea is to make TidBITS available to an ever-increasing number of people - we joke that our goal is world domination by the year 2000, our tenth anniversary. So, TidBITS will be appearing in an increasing number of places both on and off the Web. Who knows, maybe we can get Power Computing to bundle a free subscription to TidBITS with all of their Macintosh clones.

We also have plans to use what clout we have due to our large readership to do cool things for readers. Nothing's official yet, but we think we can continue to create situations, as with our sponsorship program, where everyone wins. And, of course, in the process we hope to promote some of our basic philosophies about how customers should be treated no matter where they live, how online support can improve service and cut costs, and how the Internet can break down barriers between people. Everyone has an agenda, and you should always keep that in mind. We hope that ours is sufficiently out in the open that you can judge for yourself whether or not you approve of our actions both in the past and in the future.

Article 6 of 19 in series

15 Apr 1996 | Print

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TidBITS 6.0

by Adam C. Engst

We're a little too tired to make much of this fact, but this issue of TidBITS marks our sixth anniversary of publication. We started publishing TidBITS each week in April of 1990, which makes us one of the longest running solely electronic publicationsShow full article

Article 7 of 19 in series

14 Apr 1997 | Print

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TidBITS 7.0

by Adam C. Engst

This week marks the seventh year of TidBITS, making us serious Internet geezers. If you're new to TidBITS (and many of you are!) I thought I'd take a moment to note where TidBITS is on this anniversaryShow full article

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This week marks the seventh year of TidBITS, making us serious Internet geezers. If you're new to TidBITS (and many of you are!) I thought I'd take a moment to note where TidBITS is on this anniversary. Back in April of 1990, Tonya and I released the first issue of TidBITS to the Internet in HyperCard format (a format that survived for 99 issues before being replaced by setext). Since then we've published on a weekly basis through several Apple CEOs (Sculley to Spindler to Amelio), numerous business cycles for Apple Computer, the release of more Macs than we can count, the arrival of Macintosh clones, the continuing ascendancy of the Internet, the hyping of Java, and the change in fortunes of industry luminaries like WordPerfect, Aldus, Borland, Ashton-Tate, and Lotus.

You could argue that the world has changed completely since we began, and in many ways it has. Heck, even some of our April Fools jokes (such as in TidBITS-052) have come true. But, just as everything continues to change at an increasingly fast pace, there's also a case to be made for everything staying much the same. Microsoft still calls many of the shots in the computer industry. Apple still gets bad press even when it's undeserved. The Mac OS is still the easiest operating system to learn and use. Macworld Expos are so similar that it's almost impossible to remember what happened at any given show.

Some Numbers -- Even TidBITS embodies this dichotomy (and we've never been afraid to use the occasional word that might require a trip to the dictionary - think of it as expanding horizons). Our format has stayed extremely consistent since the switch from HyperCard, and we've stuck within our informal limit of 30K of text per issue without fail (other than a few special issues). And yet, the number of people reading TidBITS continues to skyrocket. Our English-language mailing list (originally run thanks to the generosity of Rice University, and now run on a Power Mac 7100 and StarNine's ListSTAR) served about 19,000 people in April of 1995, 37,000 in April of 1996, and 46,000 today. In April of 1995, TidBITS went to 65 countries; today that number has hit 106, including a number of countries that weren't on the Internet two years ago (or weren't even countries). Want to help those numbers? Tell your friends they can subscribe to TidBITS, for free of course, by sending an email message to <tidbits-on@tidbits.com>.

We've found it difficult to estimate the number of TidBITS readers, thanks to redistribution lists and popular areas like the comp.sys.mac.digest newsgroup, which can't be tracked well. Nonetheless, we've always committed to publishing in as many ways as made sense, so we'll continue to make issues available via email, FTP, Usenet news, and of course the Web. Check our Web site for the latest issue and links to every past issue of TidBITS.

<http://www.tidbits.com/>

The Top Seven -- Leading the pack in number of English-language subscribers in the country category are the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. The top seven Internet providers are AOL, EarthLink, CompuServe, Netcom, MindSpring, Northwest Nexus, and AT&T WorldNet. The top seven non-ISP companies (many others have internal distribution lists we can't track) are Apple, Motorola, Hughes Aircraft, Microsoft, DuPont, McDonnell Douglas, and Schlumberger. The top seven educational institutions are University of Minnesota, Stanford University, University of Michigan, Cornell University, University of Washington, University of Texas, and Harvard University.

In my mind, our most impressive achievement is that we've published on a regular weekly schedule the entire time. In the early days, a weekly schedule and a shorter lead time than any paper publication put us on the edge of speedy computer journalism. These days, it's hard to avoid being inundated with poorly-written, poorly-researched daily news (though there are notable exceptions, like Matt Deatherage's MDJ and Ric Ford's MacInTouch). We try to do more than merely report the news, and instead try to offer some context or analysis so you can get a better sense of what it all means. And, sometimes we ignore events because we don't want to clutter your brains with useless information. I believe that's what sets a publication apart from a stream of raw data.

<http://www.gcsf.com/>
<http://www.macintouch.com/>

Finances -- I'm pleased that we've kept TidBITS completely free all these years. I won't pretend that TidBITS has made us rich, but we've never lost money (in fact, we made about $900 million more than Apple last year, if you want to talk bottom line). Most of TidBITS's income comes from our sponsors, and it has enabled us to contract with Geoff Duncan and Jeff Carlson, our Technical and Managing Editors. Without their help, we'd never be able to keep up our schedule and quality, both of which are important to us. As much as TidBITS remains an idealistic venture, it must also remain a viable business.

Interestingly, we started the sponsorship program back in July of 1992, before the Web had appeared and years before advertising on the Internet was even acceptable, much less commonplace as it is today. Although a few of our early sponsors have been acquired or are no longer around, most current and past sponsors have proven to be the stalwarts of the Macintosh and Internet worlds. Among this group are (in order of appearance) Nisus Software, Dantz Development, APS Technologies, Northwest Nexus, PowerCity Online, Hayden Books, InfoSeek, Power Computing, America Online, EarthLink Network, Aladdin Systems, Small Dog Electronics, and our most recent sponsor, StarNine Technologies.

Any Macintosh or Internet company that's interested in supporting a high-quality, free resource like TidBITS and reaching a few hundred thousand readers each week should contact Tonya at <tonya@tidbits.com> for more details. Who knows, one of these years Apple or Claris might even sponsor us.

Translations -- 1996 also marked the year in which TidBITS translations came into their own. The Japanese translation team has done a wonderful job since TidBITS-281 (and has amassed their own mailing list of over 8,600 people), and the other five language teams (Chinese, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish) basically all appeared in 1996. Thanks to our early status as one of the few sources of timely information for readers in other countries, and our efforts to not ignore international concerns, being able to publish in six different languages has been a real treat. As always, if you're interested in helping the volunteer translation teams by translating an article every so often, check our Web site for the address of the appropriate coordinator. We're always happy to have more help with translations.

<http://www.tidbits.com/about/translations.html>

Further Reading -- If you're interested in TidBITS history, you might want to browse our past anniversary issues. Check out TidBITS-001, TidBITS-120, TidBITS-173, TidBITS-222 (the most detailed history so far), TidBITS-273, and TidBITS-324. We're proud of the fact that every single one of our issues is available online. Two conversions were necessary for that to be true. In 1992, my sister Jennifer Engst converted the first 99 HyperCard issues into setext, and toward the end of 1996, our Contributing Editor Matt Neuburg converted the first 275 setext issues into HTML to flesh out our Web presence. Everything's available on our Web site, so feel free to browse.

<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/>

In the end, I feel that TidBITS is entering its prime (after a year of being divisible by two and three). There's no telling if we'll make it to the next prime number in four years, but we have no plans to stop.

Article 8 of 19 in series

13 Apr 1998 | Print

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Bring Your Own Badge

by Tonya Engst

Bring Your Own Badge -- This week, TidBITS celebrates its eighth anniversary, making it one of the oldest and largest edited publications on the InternetShow full article

Article 9 of 19 in series

20 Apr 1998 | Print

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Announcing TidBITS Talk

by Adam C. Engst

In honor of our recent eighth anniversary of publication, we're trying something new, and you're invited to participate. Though TidBITS is often described as a mailing list, we consider it a publication that chooses electronic methods of distributionShow full article

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In honor of our recent eighth anniversary of publication, we're trying something new, and you're invited to participate. Though TidBITS is often described as a mailing list, we consider it a publication that chooses electronic methods of distribution. Though that's not unusual now, it was eight years ago, when discussion-based mailing lists ruled.

So, we've set up a small auxiliary mailing list, called TidBITS Talk, for discussing TidBITS-related topics. The goal of TidBITS Talk is to open a public channel of communication so TidBITS readers can more easily communicate with each other and with the TidBITS staff.

This list should prove beneficial for readers and staff members. Sometimes we want to ask a question or float ideas past readers without cluttering a TidBITS issue or soliciting responses from thousands of people. And, we know from experience that many of you have questions, comments, or suggestions surrounding TidBITS articles that are valuable, but which we lack the space to publish or time to answer fully. Now we'll have a place to forward the best of those that we can't address personally.

Acceptable Topics -- It's important that TidBITS Talk not degenerate into a high volume discussion list, so we'll start by moderating with a heavy hand. Since moderation is extra work, I hope that the list will stay sufficiently focused that we can turn off moderation on a sporadic basis. Discussions are restricted to topics related to TidBITS, including:

Questions about a TidBITS article
Comments on TidBITS articles
Suggestions for future TidBITS articles
Staff questions while researching articles for TidBITS
Meta discussions of TidBITS itself
Anything else we feel is appropriate

The following types of messages are not okay:

Spam, chain mail, or virus warnings (posting these is grounds for removal)
Press releases, commercial notices, attachments, or Web site announcements
Questions asking if TidBITS has covered a topic previously (use our Web search engine)
Questions relating to a TidBITS subscription (send email to <subscriptions@tidbits.com>)
Support questions that don't relate to a current topic in TidBITS (ask on a general Mac discussion group, such as Info-Mac or a comp.sys.mac.* newsgroup)
Me-too postings after a topic has been addressed sufficiently
Anything else we feel is inappropriate

We plan to keep the volume of postings low to avoid overwhelming subscribers. We may even hold messages to avoid sending out too many in a single day. Also, we're more likely to post messages that are well-reasoned, well-written, and avoid unnecessary vitriol. Don't take message rejection personally; it will be done in the interests of making the list a useful resource for us all.

Technical Setup -- For the moment, TidBITS Talk runs in FogCity's LetterRip Pro 3.0.1 on our SE/30, which has a 56K frame relay Internet connection. We want to see how LetterRip Pro stands up to the traffic on the SE/30; if necessary, we'll move the list to a faster machine.

<http://www.fogcity.com/>

The trade-off with using LetterRip Pro is that the list is divorced from the subscription database we use for the main TidBITS list. Our main system is currently designed for a weekly distribution schedule, not a discussion list. So, if you want to unsubscribe from both TidBITS and TidBITS Talk, you must do so separately. We also can't do sophisticated bounce processing as easily.

Usage Instructions -- Subscribing and unsubscribing to TidBITS Talk is easy. No commands are necessary - just send email to the appropriate addresses, which also appear in the headers of every message.

To subscribe, send email to <tidbits-talk-on@tidbits.com>.
To unsubscribe, send email to <tidbits-talk-off@tidbits.com>.
To switch to digest mode, send email to <tidbits-talk-digest@tidbits.com>.
To change your address, first unsubscribe from the old address, then resubscribe from the new one.
To post a message, send it to <tidbits-talk@tidbits.com>.

Unless you note otherwise in a message, we reserve the right to edit and publish materials posted to the TidBITS Talk list in TidBITS itself (with full credit, of course).

So hey, if you're one of those people who sends us comments after every few issues of TidBITS, subscribe to TidBITS Talk and share your comments with other interested readers. If we're all careful, we can turn TidBITS Talk into a great resource for everyone.

Article 10 of 19 in series

19 Apr 1999 | Print

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TidBITS Nets Ninth Anniversary

by Adam C. Engst

This issue marks our ninth year of publication, and if anything, I remain all the more amazed that we're still publishing TidBITS. Flux runs rampant in the computer industry, and many Mac publications have come and goneShow full article

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This issue marks our ninth year of publication, and if anything, I remain all the more amazed that we're still publishing TidBITS. Flux runs rampant in the computer industry, and many Mac publications have come and gone. TidBITS has participated in the rise of the Internet, changing to match the latest technologies and trends while remaining true to our roots. I'd like to take this opportunity to explain some of the motivations that have driven weekly publication of TidBITS since 1990 and the philosophies that influence what and how we publish.

Motivations -- A common question about TidBITS is: "How do you make money?" The short answer is "via sponsorships," of course, but a question we hear less frequently is "Why do you publish TidBITS?" It's all due to motivation, and although our motivations have evolved, they remain similar to those we had in the beginning.

Back in 1990, Tonya and I created TidBITS because we wanted to update her coworkers at Cornell University with the latest developments in the computer industry. Tonya also wanted to hone her PageMaker skills, and I immediately abstracted the idea to electronic publishing via HyperCard and the Internet. Our overall goal was to spread interesting information and opinions to other people. In my opinion, that desire to tell the stories must be the primary goal of most writing.

We didn't consider money as a goal for quite a while. I can't recall when we came up with the idea of sponsorships in TidBITS, but reality touched down in 1992, when we attracted our first sponsorships. At that time, the Web was still over the horizon, graphical banner ads were unimaginable, and advertising was distinctly not kosher on the Internet. We worked hard to ensure that our sponsorships were more than just advertisements, offering information via email that was hard to get in those pre-Web days.

Over the years, we've had to consider business realities when making decisions, and, particularly now that TidBITS supports a small staff, maintaining an income flow is an important goal. That said, no one will ever get rich from TidBITS, so despite the need to bring in money, our original motivation of sharing information remains ascendant.

We've also stayed true to another of our original motivations - to create a constantly expanding archive of quality information that people could use as a research tool, both for current projects and historical looks back. That's why the original TidBITS HyperCard stacks knew how to combine themselves into an archive, why we worked with Akif Eyler on his Easy View program for browsing text, and why we now put so much effort into our online database to expose older content that's still relevant (see Geoff Duncan's article below).

This desire to create an archive of related information was also one of the reasons I created TidBITS Talk last year. TidBITS is too small of an organization to produce all the content we want or to have expertise in every field. By opening up TidBITS Talk to knowledge from many of our readers, we expand the amount of knowledge we can provide to others.

TidBITS Talk is also the embodiment of something we've enjoyed about TidBITS since the beginning - an online community. To paraphrase U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous comment about defining obscenity, online communities are difficult to describe, but you know them when you see them. Before TidBITS Talk, we felt a sense of community around TidBITS, but we weren't sure to what extent our readers felt they were participating. Since its creation, TidBITS Talk has coalesced into a true online community that keeps members coming back both for the information and the sense of belonging.

Philosophies -- Due in part to our limited journalistic experience when we started TidBITS in 1990, we've formed an unusual set of philosophies surrounding what we publish in TidBITS.

First and most important, we select the information that appears in TidBITS carefully. We hope that by focusing on topics of particular interest to us, our enthusiasm will show through. It's an unfortunate fact of life that our interests don't precisely overlap the interests of our entire readership, but there are plenty of other sources of information for topics we don't cover. Also, we don't wish to compete in the "all the news, updated constantly," field of Web journalism because, frankly, we can neither handle the immense workload required to do that work right, nor force ourselves to write about topics that we don't find compelling.

Although we're serious about being editors and creating a professional publication on a regular schedule, we're also firm believers in the statement, "If it's not fun, it's not Macintosh." For us to continue publishing TidBITS, we have to enjoy what we're doing. Having fun was hard during the end of 1997 and beginning of 1998, when Apple seemed caught in a death spiral, but now we're glad we stuck with it.

Another of our major philosophies is that our information should be as accurate as we can make it. We usually avoid writing about software that isn't available; we shy away from reporting all but the most universal bugs or conflicts, and we publish essentially no rumors - all in the name of hard information. We're well aware that this attitude means that people read other publications for the rumors, pre-release news, and troubleshooting information, but we can't do everything. Long ago, when our weekly electronic publishing schedule meant that we could scoop MacWEEK's print edition, we were more likely to publish a rumor, news of a new product, or a conflict between popular extensions. Today we avoid publishing this sort of information unless we can confirm the rumor absolutely, test the pre-release software, or both reproduce the conflict and confirm it with the developers. It's a trade-off between the rush of the scoop and the satisfaction of publishing something you're positive is correct.

Why have we shied away from such popular types of information? Two reasons. First, the longer you spend in the industry, the more you learn that there are multiple sides to any story. Whatever you publish will have an effect on a company, individuals at that company, and a wide range of Macintosh users. So, if we hear a rumor, we judge not just the reliability of the information but also the effect that publishing the rumor will have. After this many years, we're privy to a great deal of information that we can never use in TidBITS or even mention to friends, but that is still extremely useful to our understanding of the ebb and flow of the industry. People talk to us because they know we'd never pass on even possibly privileged information.

Second, whenever we published rumors or bug reports in past we were immediately inundated with email from readers asking for more information. Since even now we try to respond to every message sent to us (with varying degrees of success), receiving a few hundred messages after publishing an article was overwhelming. We dislike being overwhelmed, so we avoid publishing incomplete information that seems likely to stimulate cries for more details.

Third, when we look back at what we've published, we're happiest with the articles you're unlikely to see in any other publication. News that a product has shipped is widespread and essentially public domain, so we prefer to devote our space to unusual subjects, in-depth reviews, or even multi-part overviews of a topic. We're trying to reveal tiny bits of the universal truths about the world, and we're happy to speak at enough length and in enough depth to do that, describing experiences, thoughts, research, or even historical background as necessary.

Individuals & the Macintosh Ecosystem -- Related to all of this is our belief in the importance of the individual, "the person behind the personal computer," as we used to say. To us, the Macintosh industry is not a collection of faceless impersonal corporations out to make a buck, but a civilized ecosystem of individuals including developers, product managers, marketers, PR representatives, other members of the press, and - most important - users. Our utopian belief is that everyone within the ecosystem has a responsibility to other members of the ecosystem. The system relies on a capitalist structure, so competition can and should benefit the ecosystem. If two competing products continually leapfrog each other in a quest to offer the best solution to users, everyone benefits.

But everyone within the ecosystem must understand the effect of their actions, not just on the macro level of a company, but on the micro level of the specific people who are affected. Every ecosystem will have dominant life forms, but sustainable ecosystems have a balance between a diverse set of life forms. The Macintosh ecosystem is no different. Buying an expensive program rather than pirating it might help improve a company's bottom line enough to allow one of its programmers to set up shop on her own; she, in turn, may produce a unique shareware product that enhances the user experience sufficiently that Apple decides to license the code for inclusion in the Mac OS. Similarly, a good idea from a single programmer distributed as freeware might catch on and change the whole industry's expectations for how software should work.

To quote Ted Nelson, the father of hypertext, "Everything is intertwingled." It's easy for us to focus on ourselves, but in fact looking outward and considering the impact of our actions on the ecosystem is more likely to improve life for all of us.

Thinking of others is what created the Macintosh community. That level of community doesn't exist in most other industries, and it is directly responsible for the Macintosh's success over the years, especially during the tough times. Craig Isaacs of Dantz Development told me recently that in a survey to find out how people learned about their backup program Retrospect, he was stunned to learn that 37 percent of the respondents heard about it via word of mouth. That tells me Macintosh users talk to each other, support each other, and create a self-sustainable network with users and companies - in short, an ecosystem.

We're often asked if there is a PC equivalent of TidBITS. We've looked, but we've never found a publication that resembles what we do with TidBITS. In large part, we believe this is because the PC world lacks a sense of shared community, perhaps due to the sheer number and diversity of PC users, the lack of a single company to rally around, or the fact that using a PC is often more of a default action than a conscious choice.

In 1990, TidBITS started life as a gift to the Macintosh online community, and over the years, we feel it has become a significant part of the Macintosh ecosystem. In turn, though, we have many people to thank for our success, including our staff, our authors, our sponsors, our volunteer translators, and most important, our readers. If it weren't for you, we wouldn't bother, and you have our sincere appreciation for giving us a reason to do something we love.

Article 11 of 19 in series

17 Apr 2000 | Print

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Lessons from Ten Years of TidBITS

by Adam C. Engst

With this issue of TidBITS, we're marking our 10th anniversary of continuous Internet publication. We've watched as Apple's fortunes have waxed and waned and waxed again, as software products have come and gone, and as Macs have become faster, smaller, and more colorfulShow full article

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With this issue of TidBITS, we're marking our 10th anniversary of continuous Internet publication. We've watched as Apple's fortunes have waxed and waned and waxed again, as software products have come and gone, and as Macs have become faster, smaller, and more colorful. We like to think we played a small role in the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet and the rise of the Web while continuing to promote tried-and-true methods of email distribution. We've shepherded TidBITS through transitions from a simple HyperCard stack to a universally readable structure-enhanced text format to a multi-faceted publishing model that tightly integrates our original content with information polled from readers and moderated discussions among our most interested subscribers.

We've kept TidBITS free the entire time, initially through sheer perseverance, then through careful implementation of one of the very first sponsorship programs to appear on the then-non-commercial Internet. We're able to keep producing TidBITS through the continued support of our corporate sponsors, and most recently with the assistance of the nearly 500 readers who support TidBITS directly through our reader-instigated voluntary contribution program. Our approach to reporting the news, issues, and products that interest us (and hopefully you) has evolved over the years, but we've retained our basic philosophy of attempting to provide solid, accurate information that's relevant to most Macintosh users.

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To give you an idea of the scope of what we've done, as of this writing we've published 527 issues containing over 4,500 articles written by more than 250 authors. These include 209 reviews, 212 news articles, 198 how-to and informational articles, 138 analyses and commentaries, and 140 technology overviews. Plus, in its two years of existence, TidBITS Talk has carried almost 6,700 messages in over 1,000 threads. Each issue of TidBITS is translated into five languages by teams of volunteers translators - you can now read TidBITS in Dutch, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.

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All this is by way of saying that we think we've accumulated some small amount of experience during the last ten years. Although we can by no means claim any unique wisdom, we have learned a bit about the world in publishing TidBITS and working with the Macintosh community. This week we'd like to share ten of those lessons with you. We try to conduct our personal and professional lives by these rules; perhaps you'll find them interesting, useful, or even applicable to your own life.

Maintain Lines of Communication -- As a general rule, we try to reply to every piece of email we receive, and although that's become less possible over the years as the volume of mail has increased, it remains a major goal to reply in a prompt fashion. Similarly, though we attempt to avoid spending too much time on inefficient telephone conversations, we always answer our own phones and return messages. We feel that these approaches to remaining accessible are important for both staying in touch with the community and remaining part of the community.

Live by Your Word -- This lesson boils down to "do what you say you'll do." We've stuck with our regular weekly publication schedule for ten years (excepting announced breaks), and it continues to amaze us that reliability in meeting deadlines is apparently considered an unusual trait. When attempting to assess reliability, we've asked people how many papers they turned in late or failed to do in college, since the answer often reveals basic information about how motivated the person is to complete projects on time. That said, as much as we believe a verbal agreement is binding, we've also become fans of brief written contracts that outline an agreement since they tend to eliminate confusion later on. In a few cases, we've been paid by sponsors only because of our insertion order contracts, and we've been quite saddened by the few sponsors who have failed to pay even then.

Make Friends, Not Enemies -- Though it's impossible to get along with absolutely everyone, we feel strongly that it's worth giving an extra effort to make friends with people. That's one reason we try to respond to all of our email, and time and again that effort has paid off. In the early days, distribution of TidBITS was significantly aided by people who had nothing to gain by helping, and today, our translations exist purely from the goodwill of the volunteers who do the work each week. Simply put, if you help people, they're much more likely to help you later on, potentially in significant ways. It turns out some of those fairy tales we read as kids were right.

The corollary to this lesson is that although we would quibble with the first part of the cliche "It's not what you know, it's who you know," we can't argue with the second part. Personal networking is what drives much of the computer industry, and the more people you know, the more valuable you are in almost any position.

Care about Your Community -- Personal relationships are incredibly important, but you must also keep the community in mind. People are social animals by nature, and we both form and find ourselves included in communities all the time. We've found tremendous good in giving back to the Macintosh community. After all, the community is where we live (physically or virtually), and ignoring your community is always self-defeating. One of the best examples of this kind of work is FreePPP, which was created by a group of programmers who provide the results of their labors for free, but who ask companies using it for commercial ends to pay a licensing fee of a $1,000 charitable donation. I've coordinated licensing of FreePPP for the last few years, and in that time it has raised about $20,000 for various charities.

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Learn When to Stop Working -- Any idiot can work all the time, and most do. We may spend much of our lives in our little virtual worlds, but there is a real world out there as well, and it's populated with real friends and real family. We learned long ago that no matter how strongly we felt about our work, we had to force ourselves to get away from the computers and experience the rest of what life has to offer. Take a walk in the woods, enjoy a fine meal, lounge in bed occasionally - the details don't matter, but isolating yourself from the real world only narrows your field of view.

Do Everything for the Right Reasons -- Although TidBITS does have to continue to be a viable business, it w

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