StarNine Technologies Sponsoring TidBITS

by Adam C. Engst

StarNine Technologies Sponsoring TidBITS -- We're extremely pleased to welcome our latest sponsor, StarNine Technologies. As many of you know, StarNine makes the popular Macintosh Web and mailing list servers, WebSTAR and ListSTAR, along with some mail gateways and Quarterdeck Mail (nee Microsoft Mail). The other products notwithstanding, WebSTAR and then ListSTAR really put StarNine on the map for us.

WebSTAR began as the shareware MacHTTP, created by Chuck Shotton. When Chuck announced that StarNine had acquired MacHTTP and would be renaming it WebSTAR, we were concerned. Not all shareware makes the transition to the commercial world, but Chuck and StarNine did well, making WebSTAR the leading Mac Web server and continuing to push the feature and performance envelopes.

As important as WebSTAR is (and TidBITS uses it for our Web server), ListSTAR saved our bacon in August of 1996, when Rice University shut down the aging IBM mainframe that had been hosting the TidBITS mailing list. We moved the entire list to a Power Mac 7100 running ListSTAR, and it (along with a custom FileMaker database) has run smoothly since. Considering that there are over 46,000 people on the TidBITS list, ListSTAR demonstrates the fact that Macintosh is a serious Internet server machine.

In September of 1995, the now-beleaguered Quarterdeck Corporation acquired StarNine, which initially looked like a synergistic move. Little development came of it, but StarNine has remained a wholly-owned subsidiary and thrives on its own. We're happy to see StarNine supporting the Internet community via their sponsorship of TidBITS and other Macintosh resources like the Info-Mac Digest. [ACE]