Was reading TidBITs in the 90s on a SE 30, on Setext (?) maybe, sometime before Tonya had a major accident. Such a long time ago!
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Congratulations on these milestones, and on a really fun issue of TidBITSā I enjoyed the whole thing!
I realized as a result of this poll that Iāve been reading TidBITS intermittently since nearly the very beginningā my first TidBITS issues were HyperCard stacks downloaded from Sumex in 1991. I stopped reading for a while in the early 2000s when I didnāt have a Mac for a while, but iOS brought me back in the 2010s and Iāve been here ever since. (Iāve never been one to settle down with a single brand of technology, though since I got my first iPhone Iāve never been tempted to carry any other smartphone).
Iām having trouble thinking of a single concrete example of how TidBits influenced my life, but Iāll say it was one of several important influences that I encountered early in my adulthood that showed me what a career in technology might look like. I ran into Adam on the expo floor at my one and only visit to Macworld San Francisco and was a bit starstruck.
Anyway, congratulations and may TidBITS continue as long as itās what you want to be doing!
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What were the dates for the Hypercard stacks? I picked one of the earliest dates in the drop-down as a guess, but thatās when I started.
I think youāre right on (community is key and it has faded) - I emphatically (but sadly) was nodding my head through the whole āWhat Appleās 50th Missesā article. Itās a very different world now, and Iām afraid itās here to stay - we wonāt ever be going back there. But as far as āwhat can we do about itā NOW? Swim upstream against the divisive trends - try to build/retain community, and never stop saying it āhow it isā - that the Finder has been broken forever, and how Iām SO fed up with Appleās arrogance and their insistence on doing things āfor meā because, after all, they know BETTER, they KNOW everything I want before I ask for it. The hubris isā¦ immeasurable. They may be taking longer to follow the prescribed story arc, but theyāll be going down, like every company whoās fallen before them because of their hubris.
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My first computer was a TRS 80 from RadioShack. I used it to teach BASIC programming to my students in High School. My first family computer was an Apple IIC. Getting online to the Internet required using an acoustic modem and mass data storage was an audio tape recorder. I donāt remember the year. I do remember joining a couple of Apple Mac User Groups (MUGs) for help and community learning about the latest hardware and software. About that time TidBITS came along and it really made a difference. Adamās focus on āEverything Appleā was just what I was looking for. When it came time to become a supporting member I readily joined. I grew to rely on the advice Adam would give about new releases of the various operating systems. Were they good, not so good, or wait for a better version. I watched TidBITS grew as the Apple hardware and applications grew. Now things are getting beyond me and my desire to keep up with everything. But I will still look to TidBITS for advice when I need help or want to know what is new or happening in the āwonderful world of Appleā. Oh, by the way, I just celebrated my 75th birthdayā¦
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Just want to play devilās advocate for a moment: hasnāt Apple, at least since the Mac era began, always been this way? From the historic āno number pad or arrow keysā edict to the current unusable ācarrying caseā for the AirPods Max, Iād say Apple has a long history of removing ports, making both first party and third party software obsolete, putting power buttons in strange places, creating proprietary connectors and peripherals ā¦the list goes on and on, no?
And:
ā¦itās really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people donāt know what they want until you show it to them.
Steve Jobs, 1998
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Point taken, but itās maddening and I wanna call it ādumb luckā. Maybe Iām an āodd duckā and have been irritated by more than my share of those āchoicesā that Steve & Co. made for me - and thanks for reminding me of the latest, the M4 Mini Power switch, I shake my head every time I turn mine on. Another newer one is on the M4 MacBook how touching any key (besides the POWER key) will turn the thing on. I use that ātestā to verify Iāve shut the thing OFF before closing the lid.
But it truly is the community that formed early on, to āsaveā us from all those bad choices Apple made - ways to circumvent or minimize their impact over the most banal of choices. That was when the majority of people were discovering what computing could do for them and what they could do with it. Now itās a commodity and the young users of today donāt give these things a thought - and I suspect plenty of them in the ranks at Apple. Change is fine, if it has legitimate purpose. Am I wrong in saying that Apple has made (more) changes to both hardware and software in recent years for (seemingly) NO productive purpose?
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It occurred to me to wonder if I had contributed anything to TidBITS over the course of all those years, and a search reminded me that I have been mentioned in actual issues twice: sharing an anecdote after that same MacWorld in 1994, and again in 1999 with a correction about SurfDoublerā great product in the dial-up era!
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Iāve been reading TidBits since the 32K emails started coming back in 1992 (according to Gemini AI, who corrected my assumption that I started reading in 1990). At the time, I was serving as the education director at a church in Central Florida. My nose was always in some radio back then as an amateur radio operator since 1970, so my computer life didnāt get started until 1986. My friend, who also served on our church education board, worked at a computer store. Iāll always remember visiting his store to find a computer to use at my church job. When I got to the store, Jerry sat me down at a PC Junior and gave me a quick tutorial about how to insert disks, the commands to type, etc., all so I could try to create a simple document. I think it involved a text doc plus a simple spreadsheet. After maybe 20 minutes fighting with DOS, he came over and asked me how I was doing. āNot so well,ā was my response. He then told me that the store sold IBM and Apple computers. Would I like to try an Apple Mac? āSure!ā I said. The PC Jr experience wasnāt going so well, so I had nothing to lose and was ready to go back to 3x5 cardsāmy 1986 version of Hypercard, which I never used. Thatās how I learned I didnāt get started as a TidBits subscriber until at least January 1992 with the switch from Hypercard downloads to 32k hard limit emails.
Jerry got me into Appleworks for my Mac debut, showed me how to use the mouse (the PC didnāt have one of those), and then went to help another customer while I played. Within 30 minutes, I had completed my church project using the GUI on a Mac 512Ke machine. When he came to check on me, I said, āI need one of these! I also need a disk to save all my work, because Iām not gonna do it all over again using 3x5 cards and my office IBM Selectric typewriter (the same one I learned on back in 1970 during tenth grade).
Somehow, over the next few weeks, we managed to convince the church to buy 3 Macs and a Laserwriter, plus a bunch of AppleTalk connectors and some RJ-11 telephone cables from Radio Shack. All for the bargain price of $11,000 (in 1986 dollars)! A feat I still canāt believe.
Sometime in 1992, I heard of TidBits and subscribed. Iāve been reading the weekly issues since around Issue #100 or so, according to my Gemini research. Within the next year or so, I found the Internet Starter Kit for Mac and read it cover-to-cover. I carried that tome around with me for years and referenced it many times, and used the floppy disk tools that were included. That got me started on the Internet. Iāll always remember my ham radio friends telling me during an on-the-air discussion while I was āmobileā heading somewhere, to get involved in the Internet. I had no idea what the Internet was. Adam, TidBits, and some forward-looking digital radio friends held my hands until I got started. Good memories. Thanks, Adam, Tonya, and the TidBits staff for many good years of help with my many Macs and all the other Apple tools that keep my digital life working smoothly to this day.
Paul ā Amateur Radio operator N4FTD
A Happy M1 MacBook Air user
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I asked it also, but my CompuServe address is long lost to memory, it reminded me that Mindspring started in 1994, and I definitely recall using that.
Gemini is a big fan of Adam āfamously organizedā.
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I know I first got on the internet using Adamās āInternet Starter Kitā around 1994-1995, so I think thatās when I also started reading TidBITS. It was after Hypercard, but still using āSetTextā format.
As for major articles that changed my life, I have to give props to Matt Neubergās article on REALbasic in 1998:
That got me into REALbasic programming ā a language/environment that is still around, though now called Xojo ā and the basis of my living for the past 24 years (I produce an ezine about Xojo called xDev).
So yeah, TidBITS changed my life! 
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That would be Akif Eylerās EasyView, which was a setext viewing app. 
And from the other side, we had started working with eSellerate to sell Take Control ebooks, and there was this support person, Lauri, who kept going way above and beyond to help us and our customers when there were issues. So when Lauri was at loose ends some years later, we jumped at the chance to bring her stellar approach to customer service directly to TidBITS and Take Control. She has now been helping us for many years, and I canāt express how appreciative we are. Not only does Lauri help everyone who has trouble with our membership system, sheās always on the lookup for ways to improve things.
The HyperCard stacks went through TidBITS #100 in January of 1992. And you can read about the switch here! My sister converted the first 99 issues from HyperCard to setext shortly thereafter so we were able to make them all available online.
I agree that itās important to swim upstream against the isolationist trends, but I think itās important to keep the community positive and constructive rather than complaining about all the little things that may cause some people consternation. As others have said, Appleās hubris has always been off the chartsāthatās built into the companyās DNAāand itās another reason why complaining doesnāt accomplish anything.
Share solutions, not complaints.
Ooo, what does it think I famously organized?
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I get the Internet Starter Kit confused with the Internet Connection Kit. The ICK is how I got on the Internet.
Well, no citations were provided 
ā¦ but the quote was āSince TidBITS is still run by its original founder, Adam Engst, they are famously organized.ā
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How did I already know about you guys back in the 80ās? I was at MacroMind until 1990 and already reading something you were writing. And remember Jon Pughās Netters Dinners?
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Congratulations on such amazing tenure. I must have started with TidBITS not long after you adopted setext.
I was inspired by your efforts and produced similarly formatted documents to share with Apple dealers across Australia when I worked for Apple. Pre-internet but we did have AppleLink (a dial-up accessed system that had some similarities with CompuServe).
Incredible to think how far weāve travelled since TidBITS founding. For some of us like Adam, Tonya and I, Macs have been around for our whole working life.
Hard to reconcile that we once worked with 512K of RAM and 512x384 pixels. A modern Apple Watch packs millions of times more RAM, thousands of times more CPU performance, and about 10 times the display pixels of a 1985 Macintosh 512K, all on your wrist. Astounding.
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That was the one (and only) time I met Adam. I think Tonya was there too (but could certainly be wrong). Tristan was still just a twinkle.
It wasnāt inconceivable, but we didnāt do anything with TidBITS until April 1990. We had gone to Macworld Expo in Boston in 1989, so perhaps we met then?
The Netters Dinners were one of the highlights of Macworld San Francisco. The first year I went, which would have been January 1992, I think, I stayed with a friend in Oakland and tried to spend as little as possible on food by eating at press events. The Netters Dinner may have been my only food expense for the week. I do remember being gently mocked by Jon Pugh, though it turned out that many of the people in the room did read TidBITS, which softened the blow. After that, I attended every Netters Dinner until Macworld folded.
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My first-read-Tidbits year (2005), is a guesstimate.
Congrats Adam, and the rest of the TidBits team. Keep up the good work !!
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