Inside

Michael J. Miller

The history of the personal computer is a story about taking tools that used to be in the province of specialists and making them available to individuals.

Spreadsheets brought financial analyis to the masses. Desktop-publishing pack-

ages let people create and print newsletters and brochures without having to spend thousands of dollars. More recently, advances in the Internet have let PC users who have something to say create Web pages that can be viewed by anyone in the world.

The stories in this issue showcase other areas where technology is letting individuals do what only big organizations could do before. Our three-part cover story, "Create Your Own CD," shows how individuals and small businesses can author multimedia titles, create training software, or build databases and put them all on CDs, starting at a relatively low price. Our product evaluations look in-depth at CD-R (compact disk-recordable) drives, multimedia authoring software, and CD-creation software. The hardware and software required is getting better, but it still has a ways to go. In our testing at PC Labs, we created dozens of original CDs that worked great--but even more that didn't work at all.

Gone also are the days when only monolithic news organizations could dictate the headlines you would read in the morning paper. Our feature story "Choose Your News" takes a look at a total of 27 services designed to let you choose the news topics you're interested in and have related stories delivered to you via custom software, through the World Wide Web or directly into your e-mailbox. These hot new technologies help you find just exactly what you need to find while filtering out everything you don't need. And some of them are absolutely free.

Flip through this issue and you'll be reminded once again why we we call these machines personal computers: They take difficult or seemingly impossible tasks and make them personal, doable, and affordable.

Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company