The earliest instance of Tidbits in my archives is 1998 or so, though I remember getting a Hypercard version. Even found something called Newton Tidbits, but I don’t think that was from the current team. Have enjoyed the articles over the years and always telling my wife when we have an Apple issue “I’ll talk to my Tidbits guys” (this is a term that includes all genders).
Thanks Adam and the team for all your work over the years.
My first Mac was an SE purchased in 1987, with which I did some early DNA sequence analysis, and wrote my PhD thesis, but it wasn’t until I started my postdoc at UW-Madison in 1989 that I really did much of anything online. I’m pretty sure I started reading TidBITS earlier, but the oldest instance a quick search turns up is a subscription acknowledgement from July 25, 1997. I know I already had found the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh indispensable, especially in a work environment largely dominated by MS-DOS.
One of those Netters Dinners is why I consider you a good luck charm.
For those who didn’t get to go: the Dinners were held at a Chinese restaurant on Sansome St. in San Francisco. This is an intense urban area, after all, it’s one of the world’s major cities. I’m a local, spent lots of time in SF, and knew what to expect when it came to trying to find parking around there. Public transit wasn’t an option. I lived 40 miles away, and the night train service back then was erratic.
So Adam got into my car and off we went. We drove by the restaurant to scope it out, and …
There was a space in front of their door. A legal space. During dinnertime.
SERIOUSLY!?
I mean - this only happens in the movies.
The dinners are long gone, and I’ve never again experienced bliss like that. Luckily, public transit is much better these days.
Dr. Julian “a tribble took it” Gómez ** www.polished-pixels.com ** @3dscientist.bsky.social
I always enjoy a good work of fiction; we don’t get to see many of those here on TBT.
I think the one and only time I met Adam in person was a Netters’ Dinner in the way back. My only Mac community at the time was MAUG on CompuServe, and the first issue of TidBITS I ever read was a HyperCard stack that someone had posted there. When I was trying to figure out what year that might have been, I ran into an interview Adam did with Neil Shapiro, founder of MAUG, back in 2000. Memories.
In case it’s not clear to anyone else: the story is not fiction.
I want to say the name was “Hunan Cuisine”. Or maybe I’m just remembering a type of food. The walk there and back from Moscone in the brisk night air was a small price to pay for a wonderful evening (and really good food, as I recall). I was impressed that @ace could lead a pack of 70-80 people through the streets of an unfamiliar city, but I don’t recall any sheep going astray.
Yes, the Hunan at Sansome and Broadway. And yes, we did walk most years—I could only lead the group in later years because I’d followed Jon Pugh and some others so many times before that. (I think I could still do the walk, but the Hunan closed in 2020.)
Thank you Adam for noting this anniversary and its numerical hints.
A couple of additional thoughts about 36 and 18(00).
In Hebrew the word for “life” is חי. Hebrew letters also serve as numbers. The numerical equivalent of חי is 18. So, in a sense we’ve reached eighteen hundred times “LIFE”.
Double חי is 36. Hebrew: לו. What’s actually interesting about that is: a tradition exists that there are 36 hidden righteous individuals in the world without whom the world would not be able to exist. I’m glad to celebrate 36 years of righteous reporting on the Apple world. (You can learn more at Wikipedia: Tzadikim Nistarim - Wikipedia ).
I found TidBITS in university all those years ago. I’ve managed to migrate my email from various systems and clients over the years so my archives in MailMate go back to the very first email I sent. And I’ve saved my TidBITS issues since I started reading it. It was an exciting time even if Apple was struggling:
…longtime Mac hardware vendor APS enters the clone arena. Also this week, details on using Netscape 3.0 with older Macs, an unsupported method for installing parts of System 7.5.3 under System 7.5.5, Maxum’s TagBuilder HTML authoring add-on, and a follow-up on why products may not be mentioned in published articles. Finally, Adam offers a detailed look at Intermind Communicator, a product aiming to change the nature of online communication.
These are lovely little bits of numerology—thanks!
Well observed. And let’s recall how vehemently opposed Steve was to making the inner workings of a Mac accessible or expandable to an end user. In the parallel universe “personal computers” were in large cases that opened with the twist of a screwdriver, port covers that could be removed so that accessory cards could poke their sockets out the back, and other strange and scary things that he’d seen Woz doing to circuit boards and boxes in that garage where the whole thing started.
My Mac SE had a SCSI connector and (I think) a headphone port, and that was it. The expansion port inside the box wasn’t supposed to be accessible to the likes of me. Somewhere in my “Mac Museum” I have, in addition to the SE itself, the “cracker kit” that allowed me to reach the two bolts buried deep in the case and literally crack it open to reach the internals. That’s how I got my Mobius monitor card up and running.
And Steve would have hated it but he had already been deposed from Apple by the time I did that.
Seeing the sponsor list reminds me of the power TidBITS had (and still has) to point its user base in particular directions. I had at least two APS drives (one hard drive and one tape drive for backup), a PowerTower Pro clone from Power Computing before Steve came back and shut them down, and an America Online account that I used to host the first Web site I built on behalf of an employer. And I carried files back and forth from that employer with help from StuffIt Deluxe!
It was very difficult for me to pick out a single time TidBITS saved my life because, reading since the early 90s means that there’s too much to choose from. Eventually I realized that it was back in the awful, torturous days of System 7 that TidBITS helped me most.
Nowadays I can mostly just ENJOY reading TidBITS, though I still count on it to reassure me about system updates and minor threats. But back in the late 90s, when I was an Art Director at a small agency, TidBITS was essential for keeping our office from totally falling apart.
We didn’t have the money for a dedicated IT guy, so it fell on me to keep an eye on things and try to keep archive and backups in order. Keep the tenuous internet connection from failing. All that.
At the same time, I had to do my design work in Quark XPress, Adobe, Freehand, and all that while restarting my machine up to ten or more times a day! System 7 was such a crappy system for so many years that I’ve kind of blocked it out. I can still remember vividly the slowly-dawning awareness that Steve Job’s new MacOSX was actually stable enough that my computer could run all day long without a reboot. It felt astonishing.
Anybody who went through this had a large and robust ecosystem of Mac publications to rely on, but TidBITS is the only survivor, besides maybe MacWorld. My gratitude for all the help you gave us back then can never be forgotten.
I must’ve started reading tidbits in the 1990’s. I recall it being in the setext format and I read it at work on a VT220 terminal connected to a VAX/VMS system. No mouse, no hyperlinks, no graphics, just ascii characters. Sounds primitive, but simpler would be a better word (and in many ways more enjoyable).
I remember buying the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (probably Second Edition) when I enrolled in my first class at the University of Oslo in August of 1994. Among other things it introduced me to TidBITS and I have been a subscriber since then. Although I’ve changed email address a few of times since then.
Regards,
Georg Sirnes Lundesgaard
Fun thread. I remember the transition from Hypercard stacks to SetText and I remember using the EasyViewer reader program, so I guess that’s 1992. Those were the days of using Compuserve Navigator to log on and run automated sessions through various forums – my first experiences with being a part of an online community.
I was living in the SF Bay Area when I discovered TidBITS, around 1993 or 1994. I was a 25-year-old budding Mac enthusiast working at Silicon Valley’s largest PR agency at the time, which happened to be a Mac shop. Can’t remember specifically how I came across TidBITS, but I subscribed and have ever since. In recent years have been happy to be part of the annual support program. I appreciate all of the work you and Tonya (and your extended team of contributors) have done over the years, and it’s been fun watching from afar as your have raised a family as I did during the same years. Time flies…..
Addendum: I guess I started reading TidBITS around 1990-1991.
The February 1984 issue of BYTE magazine had An Interview: The Macintosh Design Team which discussed their reasoning. Here’s a link to the text from the interview: BYTE Interview with the Creators of the Macintosh from 1984.
The gist was that…
Also, should recognize that giving users access to the Macintosh was dangerous! It had a CRT inside!
[Sorry, I meant a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT), and Recommended Standard 232 (RS-232)]
* That’s straight from the interview: “Rather than putting in serial ports that operate at 9600 or 92,000 bits per second […]”, but I bet that was a transcription error in the original interview. 19.2 kbps would make more sense.
I agree that he probably said 19,200 (pronounced “nineteen point two thousand”), which might have been mistakenly transcribed as “92,000”.
That having been said…
PC serial ports could always go up to 115,200 bps, but the 8250 UART typically used at the time only has a 1 byte buffer (generating an interrupt for every byte received), so at high bit-rates (anything above 9600), software often couldn’t keep up, causing characters to get dropped.
Enthusiasts would replace their 8250 chips with 16550A chips, which have a 16 byte buffer (and the later 16550AFN, which supports DMA), allowing reliable behavior at high bit-rates.
These faster UARTs became critical when dial-up modems got faster than 9600 bps (e.g., 14400, 28K and 56K).
Still, the Mac’s RS-422 capability had that beat out of the box, and its other capabilities made LocalTalk a practical reality, requiring only cheap transceivers, not expensive network interface cards.
