Charles Dickens printed on the front page of his magazine, Household
    Words,  a  public  explanation of the breakup of his marriage.  He told
    his proper  Victorian  readers  that  he  and  Catherine  Dickens  were
    ``wonderfully  unsuited to one another''.  Magazines are different now.
    Living with someone else is, in some ways, no different:  Now, as then,
    the  bedrock  on  which  lives  are built is occasionally faulty.  Like
    plates of the earth's crust, cohabitants sometimes rub each  other  the
    wrong way until something cracks, erupts, falls away.

       Memory-resident  utilities  under  MS  DOS  are  also subject to the
    tectonics of cohabitation, one moment displaying a surface of  smoothly
    overlapping  plates,  the next moment falling apart at the fault lines.
    The DOS terrain needs a seismologist, or  the  DOS  household  needs  a
    marriage  counselor, depending on where in these shifting metaphors you
    come to rest.  Remember integrated software?  (There  is  a  connection
    here,  I assure you.) Recent trends (evidenced at a utility fair in San
    Francisco sponsored by 800 Software  and  Computer  Currents  magazine)
    suggest that users soon may be offered ``integrated software'' in a new
    form:  bundled memory-resident utilities.

       Traditional  integrated packages no longer enjoy the vogue they once
    did, in part because they forced consumers  and  developers  either  to
    accept  inadequate tools because they were inextricably bound to better
    tools or to reject whole packages.

       Small utility programs, as  contrasted  with  monolithic  integrated
    packages, have many virtues:  They give the user a choice, they provide
    a chance for smaller companies to start and succeed, and they encourage
    a  healthier  and  more  competitive  market  with  more differentiable
    products.   Memory-resident  programs  put  a  premium  once  again  on
    memory-efficient   design,  that  is,  skillful  programming.   Bundled
    memory-resident utilities may or may not limit users' choices, but they
    still  leave  it  to  consumers  to  choose what products to use.  That
    freedom is beneficial to everyone.

       We applaud efforts at agreement on an open TSR (Terminate  and  Stay
    Resident,  that  is,  memory-resident)  environment  and the concept of
    user-integrable software.   As  would,  we  have  no  doubt,  Catherine
    Dickens.        -  Michael Swaine