One thing that immediately struck us about ALLMACS LIST was the sense that this is a true online community, the kind marketing people wish they could form but never seem able to duplicate commercially. Somehow, these things either grow or they don't. And this one has grown to a pleasant size.

A subscription to AllMACS will give you something new to think about almost every day, but will only rarely give you a large number of posts to wade through. And those posts -- usually between two and 12 in number -- will almost always contain some sort of useful information, or a tip about a piece of useful software -- or perhaps a warning about a program that proves to be better at system-crashing than at its intended task.

There's a modest and happy amount of "please help" questions and enough Mac gurus around that questions are generally answered quickly with "Sure. Try this.." posts, all given in the best pre-commercial Internet communitarian spirit.

This is an extremely nice bunch of people. Indeed, they're so nice that it almost makes us want to go out and buy Macs just so we can join them.