Rear-view mirror: Peachpit’s official website for the BeOS Bible was beosbible.com, and included chapter excerpts, entire chapters that were written for the book but never published, and updates for R4.5. The site was taken offline shortly after the book went out of print. Eventually, Peachpit granted me permission to mirror the contents elsewhere, but they were only able to supply a very broken, partial archive of the original site. I of course had copies of the content I had written for it, but it was going to take a lot of work to fix the fragmented tarball they had supplied. Today, out of nowhere, a user named Oren Bear provided me with a complete, working copy of the original site, which had apparently been hoovered off the web by an unknown reader years ago, and has been floating around on P2P networks ever since. Thanks to Oren, I’m finally able to reproduce beosbible.com in its entirety.
I always thought it was a funny-looking site, with odd navigation, but there you go. One for the archives.
Cool ! Of course, I still have my dead tree copy of The BeOS Bible on the bookshelf in my study, too… :)
I loved BeOS Bible, along with your MP3 book. (I had kind of hoped to see a Mac OS X book from you as well.)
Hey Jeff – For a while there, it looked like there was a possibility of doing an OS X book, but by the time that came up I was well-entrenched in the current job and Miles was born… no spare cycles.
This is a valuable resource, Scot. I’m delighted that you are hosting it. There was a minor shock wave through the BeOS/Haiku community when the Peachpit site for the book was decommissioned a while back.
As for the anonymous reader with the electronic hoover: guilty as charged… I created the “Hacker Archive” for my own use a couple years ago, and just recently shared it with a couple others, including Oren. His wish to make it again readily accessible to all led to this happy turn of events.
Cz
Can you get them to redirect the old links, at least for the front, to the new mirror? Or turn the old domain over to you so you can?
Ashok, since they’re not hosting the site at all, not likely. They’d have to actively take on hosting it before they coudl do anything with redirects, etc. Why would Peachpit put energy into this? It wouldn’t make any sense for them.