At least for beginners, Macintoshes are much the easiest way to go, and so are becoming increasingly popular. The Department has several (older) Macs installed in offices and public areas, and there are many available around campus, notably at the Tresidder Lair (second story). But high competition means using a Mac works best if you have your own, rather than having to rely on public ones. The Bookstore sells PowerBooks at fairly good discounts, and Michelle can probably provide your office with an AppleTalk connection for getting your machine up on the net. Stanford has site licences for lots of neat stuff, including the latest version of the Operating System, networking software (MacSamson), SLIP, X, Netscape, and Stanford software for searching local corpora, including the Oxford English Dictionary: Check the ``Site Licensed'' server in the Stanford AppleTalk zone. Although TeX is available for Macs, most Mac users around here use Word for their word processing. There are some very nice IPA fonts that work with Word: Ecological Linguistics (PO Box 15156, Washington DC 20003) and Linguist's Software (PO Box 580, Edmonds WA 98020-0580) are two good sources. You can use Peter Sells' Syntax Workbench to draw trees, and there are programs available to help you draw attribute-value matrices. Jennifer Arnold has made available some documentation that she has developed for an introductory course on using Macs; you may find this useful as a supplement or stepping stone to the vast amount of information that is available for this computer.