In another life I maintained the PEAK FTP Archive for NeXTSTEP and OpenStep.
Now I realize that most people don’t know what PEAK is, what FTP is, or what NeXTSTEP and/or OpenStep were, but back in the day it was a hugely important site.
Ya see, way back in the mid-1990s, few people had websites. If you wanted to release a piece of software, you uploaded it to an FTP site. FTP, which stands for “File Transfer Protocol” was designed to (wait for it) transfer files. It was, at one point, much better than http (once http servers and web browsers learned how to ‘resume’ an interrupted download, things went a lot better.
NeXT was the company that Steve Jobs created when he was kicked out of Apple (and before his triumphant return). NeXTSTEP was the name of the operating system. There was another version which was called OpenStep which might have become something, but didn’t because His Steveness went back to Apple.
Anyway, I managed the FTP site at PEAK for several years (from 1995 onward, although things died down right around the time that Steve went back to Apple). People would upload things and I would decide where to file them. Very geeky, yes.
Anyway, one of the cool things that Apple did was release patches to make NeXTSTEP and OpenStep Y2K compatible (remember that whole Y2K thing?). So, diligent as I was, I downloaded the patches to the appropriate URL at the PEAK site.
Which prompted a fax from Apple’s legal department (so I was told) “asking” us to take them off the site (and by “asking” of course I mean “telling” or “demanding”). I exchanged emails with someone @ Apple about the issue and was essentially told “Well since we can’t guarantee that you will stay up to date with this stuff, we need to keep it on our own servers.”
Well guess what, as time went on, it became harder and harder to find the Y2K patches on Apple’s website. Meanwhile the URL at PEAK hasn’t changed since 1999. But I digress. Oh, wait, that wasn’t so much a digression as proving my point 8 years ago. Not that anyone would care. The digression would be to mention that I spent a good deal of time on my own tonight searching for another tool which has gone missing (ChapterToolMe) because the domain name where it was housed has disappeared. I was just thinking “Man I wish there were still FTP sites around” because what happens is that every site in Google references the home page, which no longer exists, so finding the file is a major PITA. But I really do digress that time.
About every year or so I get an email from someone saying “The links to the Y2K patches no longer work, do you have them?” and I do a little detective work and figure out where they have moved them to this time. (Searching Apple’s website is fruitless [ha!] as searching for openstep y2k or nextstep y2kyields 0 matches. Searching for ‘nextstep’ leads to 2 results in French and 1 in German about WebObjects and NetInfo.)
The only way I found them this time was that I happened to have the filenames, and plugged those into Google, found one of them, and then worked my way from there into discovering where the files are now kept. Strangely, the NeXTSTEP files were easier to find than the OpenStep ones.
So, as of 2007-06-20, the place to look for all these files is: http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/MultiCountry/Enterprise/.
Note: if I recall correctly, files that end with “.compressed” are actually “.tar.Z” files, but if you are using NeXTSTEP or OpenStep it should recognize them properly anyway.
I will add/update information to these pages as it becomes available. Leave a comment if (when?) the link goes dead.
If they go dead, you might want to try searching for OpenStep documents at Apple via Google or searching for NeXTStep documents at Apple via Google
Other pages of particular interest: