

StepWise is no more - igrekel
http://www.stepwise.com/
StepWise was a place for technical content on the NeXT platform and what followed it. It was not very active recently anyway.
======
ryanwaggoner
<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stepwise.com>

I'm assuming that if he asks them to, Archive.org will remove it from their
archives?

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about Stepwise or the author, so hopefully I
don't offend anyone.

Things like this and the disappearance of newmogul.com make me nervous about
the ability of one individual to destroy knowledge on a whim. It might be
useful to have offshore archive centers where it's harder to get rid of stuff
like this. Yeah, I know this was the property of this one guy, and he has the
right to destroy it, but something about it doesn't sit well. Sites like this
seem to be a collection of knowledge from many different people, and it's a
bit disconcerting to see it disappear overnight.

What if archive.org decided on a whim to disappear into the night? That's a
lot of knowledge lost.

Maybe the answer is decentralized archival in general. Some kind of opt-in
network where people agree to store a bit of the internet on their machine.
Hmm...in fact, we already do this with caching. Maybe some kind of browser
plugin that makes use of those cache files for decentralized archival
purposes?

Sorry...rambling a bit. It's an interesting problem.

~~~
tlrobinson
I grabbed the pages that were in the Google cache (about 100 pages), which was
much more current than Archive.org, though possibly less complete.

I'm not sure what to do with them now though...

~~~
aristus
contact jason@textfiles.com

------
KirinDave
I don't understand why people feel the need to _delete_ sites. _Why did this
too, and I just don't get it.

I can understand shutting down the site. I can understand having new interests
or priorities. But what I can't understand is why people can't just leave
things in place with a disclaimer. This isn't 2001, bandwidth, hosting space,
domain names, and disk space are all incredibly cheap. Why burn the bridge and
scorch the earth behind you?

~~~
htsh
Though its not explicitly clear, from the explanation link posted below it
seems as if he did this due to some sort of allegation(s) of copyright
violation?

"Stepwise consisted of thousands of files. I didn't feel it was possible to
locate and remove the files that were copyright by a single individual."

(explanation link: [http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-
de...](http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-death-of-
stepwise.html) )

------
icey
Help us understand why this is important - who or what is StepWise?

~~~
protomyth
StepWise was THE site for NeXTSTEP / OpenStep. It had programming articles
(many of which was useful into the OS X days) that taught a lot. I get the
feeling a lot of OS X developers started there.

~~~
umjames
To me, what was more valuable than the articles hosted on the site, was the
set of links to other articles and blog posts at the bottom of the home page.
I found a lot of information there that made me a better developer.

I'm crossing my fingers that at least this section of the site returns some
day.

------
protomyth
explanation [http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-
de...](http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-death-of-
stepwise.html)

~~~
tdavis
I am confused. He didn't like that there was copyrighted material on the site
and rather than attempt to remove it he just closed down the site? If the
copyright holder didn't care, what did it matter?

~~~
__david__
Reading between the lines, to me it sounded like there was some personal
falling out between Scott and someone else.

"But I could not live with some of that content remaining on the site."

It just sounds like there is more to this story that we aren't going to hear
about.

