Well I went to the Stepwise website to get Mac OS X Server related information and lo and behold Scott has taken the site down permanently!!!!!!!!!!
I hope some people have archived his site or portions of his site like i have for my personal use because he had a lot of good stuff for Rhapsody users. so another great site for a great operating system has gone down for good. I hope to be able to contribute to the cause for Rhapsody sites that provide information like Racer X's excellent repository.
I hope Racer X could maybe talk to Scott to see if he could host his Step wise information or maybe someone else (Hint, Hint) like me sould host his information. I think that it is too valuable to lose any information for such a revolutionary operating system.
OK, I hate to sound ignorant, but what was Stepwise?
Stepwise was a very good site to get the latest and greatest info on Rhapsody and Mac OS X Server 1.x when they were on the development trail. It still was a great place to go when you needed a little help with somethings that time forgot about those Operating systems when you are using them today.
Gotcha. What a terrible loss. Perhaps someone has a mirror of at least the most valuable information.
I sent him an e-mail.
Odds are that I can recreate the unsupported hardware info and that I'll be able to mirror some of the software (like SWSigniture). And I specifically asked about his series on building HTMLEditor.app because it is one of the best tutorials on app building in Rhapsody that I've seen.
The real loss is a taste of the times from back in the late 1990s during the transition. Stepwise was the place to go for finding out what was happening (that much of the rest of the tech world was ignoring back then). I was really disappointed when their app server was taken down (around 2002 as I recall)... we lost access to a lot of cool Rhapsody software on that day.
I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope though... Scott hasn't been all that open to mirroring any of the Stepwise info since the Rixstep incident a few years back (where sections of Stepwise content was copied and then taken out of context to attack Apple). I got the feeling back then that he would rather not deal with the site anymore (and that it was more of a liability for him).
Sadly no amount of technical data that I can put together on my site will even match the historical perspective of those times that Stepwise offered. Articles, reviews and candid interviews of people in the trenches (as it was happening) of the NeXT-Apple transition is just not replaceable. It's another sad example of how fast history can evaporate on the internet.
The wayback machine still has some of the info, at least through 2006 or so. Some of the articles still work, but a lot of them do not. Worth a shot if you have not checked it out.
web.archive.org
Actually I think Scott had set up robots.txt to block Wayback from archiving his site.
For the next week or so you can still view cached content via Google (
here (
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.stepwise.com)), but that won't last for long. :cry:
Quote from: "RacerX"Actually I think Scott had set up robots.txt to block Wayback from archiving his site.
I kinda figured that when I got a lot of dead links, and seeing what he posted on his blog about not wanting this data to ever be mirrored or copied in the future, so was surprised when some of them did work. Possibly some customization of the robots.txt file to exclude certain content, but not others? Only Scott knows, and it sounds like he wants to wash his hands of the whole thing.
Too bad really, as the posts and articles were a true glimpse into what was really going on during that time "from the front lines" as they say.
Quote from: "RacerX"I sent him an e-mail.
Did you hear back from Scott? I mirrored a small amount of his site. Just a few pages.
1. OpenUp page.
2. OpenUp – Highlights of a Practical Application.
3. Index page of his articles, December 2002.
4. An interview with Dr. Ernest Prabhakar.
5. ColorWheel
6. Building Apache on OPENSTEP
Very sad to see his site disappear.
Quote from: "Nitro"Did you hear back from Scott?
No... which was somewhat odd (for Scott). But I figured he had been hit with a lot of e-mails around the time that he took the site down, and it wasn't something he wanted to deal with at the time. I'll give him another try when I know I have a little more time to put towards this stuff. I figured that he might be a little more open to any suggestions/requests after a little bit of time had passed.