NEW YORK - Life could be so easy! But when it comes to computers ... .

There I was, with a Macintosh Plus and what looked like an honestly promising piece of communications software to review. The Mac was minus telecommunications hardware, so I pirated a long-abandoned 1200-baud Apple modem from a pile of electronic parts on a neighboring table. But it should come as no surprise to anyone that while the two pieces of hardware, the Mac and the modem, were compatible, the cables required to...