Archive?
Phil Aypee
I’ve posted this on the Pscience5 forum, the PsionPlace forum and comp.sys.psion.misc - and anyone can post it elsewhere if they want.
It seems EPOC32 - ER1-5 - is now considered dead by a number of organisations (a lively corpse in my opinion).
PsionPlace has reduced it’s software archive, TUCOWS will probably follow.
PocketIQ has now gone the way of Neuon (and will be similarly missed).
I suppose Martin Guthrie is now the principal archiver of EPOC32 software.
But I don’t suppose either he or his site can archive it all.
Would it now be reasonable to hope that a proper archive could be made and copies placed in a few places?
An obvious candidate would be Yahoo groups, but several of them (and, yes, I know the EPOC warez people use Yahoo groups).
*But surely there are other places?*
The thing is that a proper archive needs independent duplicates so it cannot easily get lost.
I don’t have enough space to be any real use (either on the web or at home) - I’m a bit of a dinosaur anyway.
Also I’m a sad, disabled and unemployed nerd (but not, definitely *not*, in my own opinion).
But I’d offer what help I could.
I’m not suggesting that any still registerable or buyable software be archived - though it might be archived separately against the possibility of it being abandoned.
But this stuff must be kept available.
The thing is that this has happened before.
A vast amount of SiBO software was on the Imperial College site and would have disappeared if I hadn’t scooped the site.
That isn’t many megabytes compared to an EPOC32 archive so my small hard disk can store it easily.
But I may well be the principal archiver now (and there is the occasional person new even to SiBO).
But most erstwhile shareware for SiBO is now unregisterable!
RMR retain their SiBO software still (good old RMR!) and it’s likely they will also retain their ER1-5 stuff.
FreEPOC is still very active, though veering understandably towards ER6 and later (as is RMR).
But they are pretty well alone now.
I do realise that most of us have all the software we want - well, I do - but this is about the few, not the many.
Just as there have recently been a few new to SiBO, so there will be a few more new to ER1-5 over the next decade.
Take care,
Phil.
"Time wounds all heels."
http://uk.geocities.com/philadkinsp/diabetes.html
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Eric Lindsay
phil.see...@uk.invalid (Phil Aypee) wrote:
> I suppose Martin Guthrie is now the principal archiver of EPOC32 software.
> But I don’t suppose either he or his site can archive it all.
>
> Would it now be reasonable to hope that a proper archive could be made and
> copies placed in a few places?
A number of web sites now provide disk space in the gigabyte range. I
don't imagine that Psion Epoc32 downloads would be sufficiently high to
trigger additional download fees. While my usual web site only provides
70 of so MB of space, I have another unused site with far more space
available. Just never had time to go through and make it into a download
site.
mick
<snip>
>
> The thing is that this has happened before. A vast amount of SiBO software
> was on the Imperial College site and would have disappeared if I hadn’t
> scooped the site. That isn’t many megabytes compared to an EPOC32 archive
> so my small hard disk can store it easily. But I may well be the principal
> archiver now (and there is the occasional person new even to SiBO). But
> most erstwhile shareware for SiBO is now unregisterable!
>
<snip>
As a SiBO "newbie" myself, it is obviously in my interest to help keep
this stuff archived! I have set up a couple of web sites with a free
provider quite recently. You get 150MB storage, ftp access, 5GB per
day bandwidth and only one small advert on your site. Do you think that
would be ok? Do you have over 150MB of SiBO stuff? I'll let you know the
provider if you are interested.
--
Mick (Working in a M$-free zone!)
Remove blockage to use my email address
Web: http://www.nascom.info & http://mixpix.batcave.net