It's Halloween - and Guy Kawasaki's post on the 'Top Ten Leopard Tips' greets me with an early-morning flashback: Adam Engst. I immediately search my bookshelves for his Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh 2nd Edition and find it in 2nd row :) The 1000-page volume carries a time stamp, the date I bought it: October 29th, 1994. What a coincidence - that was almost exactly 13 years ago. Scary. I had forgotten that name Adam Engst despite the fact that I received his TidBITS regularly and devoured the Starter Kit cover to cover right away.
The cover reads, amongst other marketing blurb: "Software Included!
- MacWeb 0.98a - A fast, slick World-Wide Web browser that challenges Mosaic.
- TurboGopher 1.0.8b4 - The fastest way to browse the resources available in Gopherspace."
Remember Gopher?
A world without Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Safari. Scary indeed.
Wikipedia says:
"Adam C. Engst (born November 18, 1967) is a technology writer and publisher who resides in Ithaca, New York, the city in which he was born and went to college (Cornell University, 1989).
Engst is notably the publisher of TidBITS, one of the oldest Internet-based email newsletters, which is distributed weekly to tens of thousands of readers. He has also written many technical books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series in the 1990s, books on Eudora and iPhoto, and magazine articles for MacUser, MacWEEK, and Macworld. Adam is the publisher of the Take Control book series; his wife, Tonya Engst, is the editor in chief of the series.
Engst is well known for his interest and support of the Macintosh community, repeatedly ranking in the top five in the annual MDJ Power 25 survey of the most influential people in the Macintosh.
He is particularly proud of the fact that he is one of the few industry figures who has been turned into an action figure."
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