Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker

Archived columns for Byte.com and ZDNet, plus Peachpit's beosbible.com

In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on Byte.com are now virtually hidden from search engines and thus from the Internet, and hundreds of incoming links (which now redirect to a subscription page) might as well be broken.

The BeOS content I provided to Byte.com over the two years I wrote for them is tailored to a very specific niche audience. BeOS itself is, for practical intents and purposes, completely dead. Even though these articles were surprisingly well-trafficked at the time, it is hard for me to imagine that anyone would pay for access to the Byte archives just to read a few old nuggets.

My contract with Byte.com stated that I was not allowed to publish my content elsewhere for a period of three months -- after that, publication rights reverted to me. So while I encourage anyone who enjoys Byte's content to consider paying for it, I have decided to make my own contributions freely available, being of interest only to hobbiests and madmen.

Again, if you appreciate Byte's contribution to the history of computing, I encourage you to pony up the $12. It's worth it.

BeView Archives :: April 1999 - August 2001

Other Byte authors who have decided to repost content on their own domains:

ZDNet BeHive Archives :: November 1996 - April 1998

I'm also making available my contributions to ZDNet's long-defunct BeHive. These antique articles are somewhat embarassing journalistically speaking, but represent the earliest commercial journalistic coverage of BeOS and comprise a fairly detailed record of what I feel was a woefully underdocumented period in computing history. I thought the BeOS completists might appreciate them. I was never paid for the BeHive columns (I got a free BeBox in exchange for running the site) and signed no contracts per use of this content.

BeHive tarball.

beosbible.com 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 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 actual site archive they had supplied. In May 2005, Oren Bear provided me with a complete copy of the site, which had apparently been hoovered off the web years prior. Thanks to Oren, I'm finally able to reproduce beosbible.com in its entirety here on birdhouse.

An article published independently on this site in 2001 while Apple was considering whether to use NeXT or BeOS technology at the heart of OS X. This piece generated more than 500 email responses.