A new group of 20-30 Bay Area home office professionals and entrepreneurs is organizing a potluck picnic/barbecue: Tilden Park, Berkeley Hills, Sunday 6/11/95 at 12:00. Call Gene at (510) 339-3646. [Charles Hop , ba.general, 6/1/95.] (Sounds like a nice way to socialize and gain contacts. Computists could do the same -- I'd be glad to help spread the word.)

Dr. J. Presper Eckert, chief engineer and co-inventor of ENIAC, died 6/3/95 at the age of 76. Eckert and John Mauchly began work on ENIAC, at UPennsylvania's Moore School, completing the first large-scale, general-purpose electronic digital computer in 1946. Their invention grew into Remington Rand's Univac, and was later merged with Sperry Corp and then Burroughs to become Unisys. Eckert held 87 US patents and the National Medal of Science. He has been living in retirement with his family in Gladwyne, PA. [Tim Finin , 6/6/95.]

(Should you feel the need in your own life, Garden of Remembrance is offering commemorative home pages for beloved persons or pets. Text, graphics, photos, voice, music, even video. . [John Hofsess , c.i.www.misc, 5/20/95.])

("No reason why your great-grandchildren shouldn't be able to boot up your program and play a game of chess and interact with you even though you've been dead for a hundred years. If you want to immortalize, digitize." -- Timothy Leary (74), Computerworld, 5/1/95, p. 117. [EDUPAGE.])

Owners of US Robotics v.34 Sportster modems can get a ROM chip upgrade (to the 4/18/95 version) free until 6/12/95, thereafter $15 for postage and handling. Earlier chips could fail from Spiral Death syndrome, and had inferior v.34 code. Tech support is (subject line "IOD LIVE"), 800/543-5844, 708/982-5151, 708/933-552 Fax, 708/982-5092 BBS. [Patrick T. Pruyne , TidBITS, 6/5/95.]

The latest news stand issue of Mac User includes the Apple System 7.5 Update CD ROM: 138 megs of software for the price of a $5 magazine, including QuickDraw GX 1.1.1, all the PowerTalk extras, disk images, a demo of QuickTimeVR, the QuickTime 2.0 extensions, etc. The CD is nominally to upgrade System 7.5 to 7.5.1 -- a version that is rumored to be somewhat unstable -- but even non-7.5 users can benefit from MacTCP 2.0.6, SimpleText 1.2, Macintosh PC Exchange, Macintosh Easy Open, Launcher, etc. [Steve Tannehill , Mac*Chat, 6/5/95. Bill Park.] (Bill suggests that subscribers call the publisher and demand a free disc. MacTCP alone is worth $35-$50.)