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Some Macintosh-related earthquake news (as collected here in Berkeley):

- Apple gave all their employees the day off the day after the earthquake.
Most other Silicon Valley companies gave theis gmployees the day off. The
only Apple office open on Wednesday in the Bay Area was the Pleasanton
office. U.C. Berkeley still had school. :(

- Apple's mai~ problem is the loss of machines, especially at DeAnza 3.
Nobody was hurt as a direct result of the quake, but the word here is that
dozens if not hundreds of Macintoshes were damaged or destroyed at Apple
Corporate. (sorry for the line noise) Apple San Francisco's building was
perhaps severely damaged, and they may have to condemn it. They may already
have condemned DeAnza 3. For those who don't know, DeAnza 3 is where
System Software is developed. Therefore, the rumors that System 7.0 might
be seriously delayed.

- Two staffers of MacUser magazine were killed in San Francisco just after
leaving the MacroMind offices. More details later. This was the wall
collapse at Sixth and Townsend that crushed two-three cars and killed
six-seven people.

- No one here has heard from Paracomp, who has their offices in the Marina
district of San Francisco. The`Marina district was the hardest hit in the
City, with a major fire and power outage. Paracomp is the maker of products
like Swivel 3D.

- Both the S.F. Chronicle and Examiner had power outages on Wednesday and
Thursday, so instead of their normal production methods they used MS-DOS
laptop computers to enter the stories and brought them over to a building
that had a generator in it to transfer it all over to a bank of Macintosh
computers for layout and preliminary pasteup. The articles were printed
out on LaserWriters and physically pasted up before being sent to the
printing presses, which by then had been restored to partial power. Some
of the bylines in the Examiner were in Chicago font. Strangely enough,
the Chronicle mentioned Macintoshes specifically on Wednesday but not
Thursday, while the Examiner mentioned Macs Thursday but not Wednesday.
Do you think more newspapers will be buying Portables to keep in the
closet in case of emergency?

- Some Apple employees are helping with the effort to relocate the homeless
in both San Francisco and Oakland, and they are coordinating with the Red
Cross and BMUG. BMUG has donated as many of the office Macs as possible to
the Oakland Red Cross for temporary usage. They still need help, so if you
live in the area please contact BMUG at (415) 549-2684 for more details.

- BMUG came out of it fine, but two events were postponed: a hardware
seminar by me and Steve Costa (I was in San Francisco on my way to the
World Series, so I didn't get back) and Mactoberfest (because of Apple's
dearth of machines). Neither has been rescheduled, but both will probably
be in November.

If y'all want, I'll try to update these and other Mac-related earthquake
stories throughout the coming days. If not, let me know as well.

--- Alex "a little shaken up" Lau
UUCP: {att,backbones}!ucbvax!franny!c8s-an
INTERNET: c8s-an%franny.berkeley.edu@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
FIDONET: Alex.Lau@bmug.fidonet.org (1:165/444)