Scot Hacker Scot Hacker spent six years at ZDNet as an editor, columnist, and manager, first in Cambridge, Mass., and then in San Francisco, California. His love for brilliant-yet-elegant technologies began beneath the oil pan of a 1964 VW microbus -- Hacker rebuilt air-cooled VW engines for two years before coming to ZDNet, where his technical proclivities were gradually transferred to the digital realm. Before college, Hacker made a living cleaning boat bottoms and performing underwater salvage operations in Morro Bay, California, where he spent his teen years. Hacker feels fortunate to have been at ZDNet during the birth of the Web, and launched the sprawling Birdhouse Arts Collective site at the same time. Birdhouse now hosts the legendary BeOS Tip Server, a massive collection of tips and suggestions for BeOS end users. His mission since 1996 has been to bridge the technology gap between hardcore BeOS geekiness and the regular Joe. He founded ZDNet's dedicated BeOS department "The BeHive" to facilitate that effort, though he feels that this book represents final achievement of the goal. Hacker received a B.A. in Philosophy from U.C. Santa Cruz in 1989, has written technology reviews and commentary for numerous industry magazines, written on improvised music for Cadence magazine, covered technology and music for the Utne Reader and Tripod, and contributed a chapter to Pagan Kennedy's "Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 70s." Henry Bortman Henry Bortman is a freelance journalist with 15 years' experience writing about computer technology. Formerly MacUser's technical director, Bortman is currently a contributing editor to Macworld and macweek.com. Bortman has closely followed the BeOS since its first public appearance. He co-authored the MacUser article "Plan Be," the first in-depth look at the BeOS to be published by a general-circulation magazine. He is also the author of the BeOS human interface guidelines. While at MacUser, and later Macworld, Bortman wrote extensively about the Mac OS, Mac and clone hardware, and emerging technologies. He designed and subsequently directed MacUser's NetWorkShop, which when built was the most extensive AppleTalk-network test facility in the world. The list of articles that Bortman wrote for MacUser include the magazine's first review of PostScript laser printers in 1987 (there were only four on the market at the time). He also wrote the magazine's first looks at the Newton MessagePad 100 and the original Power Macintosh line, both of which won Computer Press Association awards for Hardware Product Review of the Year. He also covered the rise and fall of Mac clones, and was instrumental in developing criteria and test methodologies for comparing Mac OS systems from different vendors. Bortman is currently working on a future history of computing, a book about how computers will change -- and change our lives -- in the 21st century. He is also preparing articles on quantum computing, molecular computing, and human-computer interaction. Bortman has an AA in Telecommunications. He doesn't have a BA because he dropped out of the University of Chicago after 43 of his closest friends got expelled for occupying the Administration Building in protest over the firing of a feminist professor. (He sat in too, but his participation wasn't deemed worthy of punishment by the school's administration.) Chris Herborth Chris Herborth is an active member of the BeOS community and one of only two winners of a BeOS Masters Award for Outstanding Contributions. Chris has written technical documentation for microkernels, operating systems, GUI applications, command-line utilities, online help systems, Web sites, and various other projects.