This is sad, but apparently my backup and version control methods aren’t perfect… I’m looking for copies of my own source code from prior to September 1999. According to http://philip.greenspun.com/doc/version-history that would be ArsDigita Community System 2.2 or prior. It would also be nice to cover the source that I once distributed from demo.webho.com with my tutorial books). Apparently I put a robots.txt file in there to prevent it from being indexed (not sure why; maybe I thought the files were too big and AltaVista wouldn’t want to choke on a lot of source code?) so it isn’t in archive.org.
[I know that this sounds pathetic. My defense is that I relied on the company that I had founded to keep the source code and maintain the version control system. After I sold my shares in the company and went my separate way, the company failed and the servers were likely discarded. I guess the lesson is that programmers should keep a personal archive of everything that they’ve done.]
I don’t have a copy of the source for you, but I do have some insight into the archive.org/robots.txt situation that might help.
It seems that archive.org actually does have old archives of sites that previously did not have a robots.txt file, but will disallow access to these files if there is an active robots.txt today. I found this out recently when a site I visit dropped off the net for a few days. When I checked archive.org for this site (while it was down), I was able to access history back into the late 90s. When the site came back, so did the robots.txt, thus archive.org put up that “page cannot be crawled” page.
You might check if you know any of the archive.org staff (Stewart Cheifet!), or see if anyone there would be nice enough to check if there is some old content from your domain.
I thought I might have, but on a quick look I can’t find it. I do have an archive of the bboard forums from that time frame, but no source tarballs (yet).
Maybe. It’s on a hard drive on a slightly-damaged computer I have. Not sure what version of ACS, but it’s got Oracle 8 and Red Hat from that era. I can try to boot the computer; as a last resort I’ll send you the hard drive and see if you can pull the data.
Interesting technological feat was getting Oracle 8 to run on a 486 – I was broke back then, you see. It runs, but God-awful slow.
I love the Internet! I got two tar files from a kind soul in Germany. How many years would it have taken to find him via newspaper ads and hardcopy letters?
Congrats!
I’m always leery of keeping the source code of things I’ve produced on the payroll of companies. If I use a derivative work for a new employer, am I stealing?
Supermike: Nearly everything that I’ve worked on for the past 20 years has been open-source, so I don’t think that there are too many big legal issues. For closed-source software, the derivative work that you mention would be copyright infringement, I think.
It is quite likely that I do, since I was working with the system from the very early days, and I keep everything digital I work on. However, it would be in a rather disorganized backup that I might not have with me right now, and I’m rather busy with baby care at the moment. If you still need it, remind me in a month or so to look for it, and I’d be happy to —– by then hopefully the baby will be in a state where I won’t feel as guilty if I allow myself distractions from his care.
May I ask why you would need that software? Expert witness showing that certain features already existed back then? Just curious.
Patrick: Bingo! It turns out that quite a few of the ArsDigita Community System features were patentable, sometimes up to a decade after they were “invented” (I’m not sure how much was truly original in ACS; Jin, Eve, Tracy, and I did not claim to have invented all of the stuff that we built from 1995-1998, for example, and most of it seemed obvious even at the time).
“…most of it seemed obvious even at the time” — but you were not “a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains”. Right?