www.apdl.org.uk is lost

http://www.apdl.org.uk/ and all its resources are now gone.
Does someone has a copy of the website?

(Nota: it’s probably time to make a snapshot of riscos.com).

Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

is not a good look :(

There have been discussions elsewhere about it. If I understand correctly, there is apparently a dispute with the hosting provider, so the content is still intact but offline.

I know this doesn’t help much if you want to get at the files.

@ David

There have been discussions elsewhere about it. If I understand correctly, there is apparently a dispute with the hosting provider, so the content is still intact but offline.

As I have mentioned on twitter, if no one is interested, I am totally happy to provide my servers (at whatever price they can afford or for free) to host the whole set of APDL sites and software and provide Virtual Hosting for whoever is the maintainer to keep maintaining them remotely. I can arrange also remote backup services if it’s required.

I can provide ssh certificates renewal and everything is needed included web-based interface to manage their own virtual space.

If there are unpaid bills or whatever is the nature of the dispute (and no one can help), then the maintainer can get in touch with me directly and I can see what I can do to help with the dispute as well.

Looks like the domain is registered with one.com and it expires in a year from now.

Not sure quite why it is being sat on by a domain parking company trying to serve up adverts.

then the maintainer can get in touch with me directly

As far as I recall, it’s Aaron, as in RISC OS Ltd.

Sadly, he’s not the most communicative. I have offered to 32 bit the ISV stuff that was on the site marked as 26 bit ¹, but never heard anything back.
It would be a real shame if all of those things were lost.

¹ Some things would need sources, but other things were much simpler – the cross stitch program (an interest of mom) was written in BASIC but wrapped in a bit of code that obscured that fact. I don’t remember if it tried to compress the code or not, but it was ridiculously easy to get at the underlying program – fire up an emulator, run the program in a TaskWindow, wait for it to crash out when it tries to initialise as a Wimp task, then SAVE the BASIC code. Job done. Makes me wonder why they bothered.

As far as I recall, it?s Aaron, as in RISC OS Ltd.??

It was actually Aaron and Dave Bradforth, running the site on behalf of the Holden Family. Dave Bradforth seems to have vanished into thin air.

I have offered to 32 bit the ISV stuff

I seem to remember most of the ISV stuff had 32 bit version patches available on the site, but maybe not beyond the Iyonix changes.

I heard from Aaron on this a couple of days ago. He told me it was down due to a dispute with the hosting company but assured me it would be back up when he gets a spare couple of hours to get things sorted out with it, so fingers crossed it won’t be down for too long.

I hope so.

If anyone is in touch with them, I’m still prepared to get all the commercial games running on modern machines and to package and release them via JASPP for free.

A future of a great deal of Acorn content is worryingly precarious. We ideally need some kind of single file master archive, that people are invited to copy. Yes, such a file would be somewhat large, but I doubt the download would be substantially larger than binge-watching a Netflix series.

Full-time job to coordinate the content? ;-)

A future of a great deal of Acorn content is worryingly precarious.

Yeah, I just noticed today that it isn’t only the various files. It’s all the old magazine stuff too that has vanished. :(

but I doubt the download would be substantially larger than binge-watching a Netflix series.

Ah, but the difference is that Netflix is transient. The data arrives, it gets unpacked and decoded and then tossed at your eyeballs, at which point you’re like “eeee, shiny!” and then immediately forget whatever it was that fifty overworked processors helped bring to you.

A download? Has to be put somewhere.

PS: I’m on episode 3 of The Umbrella Academy. It’s very obtuse. Most series get you involved in things pretty early on. Boy with antlers? Okay. Cute magical girl? Okay. Guy beats up everybody? Liam Neeson, three films worth.
But this? Seems like a bunch of young adults that seem to have various “powers”, but annoyingly it’s just set up to make you ask more questions and get pretty much none of the answers. I’m just not really seeing the point…
[Not to mention Netflix’s long history of dropping series, so there’s never any continuation, never mind a resolution. I Am Not Okay With This.]

It’s all the old magazine stuff too that has vanished. :(

Acorn User seems to be more or less complete on Archive.org. What happened to Acorn Archimedes World though?

Archive Magazine would like to offer a permanent home for any abandoned RISC OS projects or content – or, indeed, current projects simply in need of a home. Subdomain and webspace provided free of charge, but RISC OS only.

It’s all the old magazine stuff too that has vanished. :(

From Archive’s point of view, I will be starting work on releasing old volumes of Archive this winter, from the first volume onwards.

Would be great if we would manage it to setup a website with all old RISC OS software in optimal case with source and resources available but it is difficulty to get this.

In Germany AFAIR Raik Fischer made several attempts to copy the according data from the webpages before they expired. But even in this quite small user area this is not ever a full success. And there may be legal questions. The last case was Niklaus Weiss. I am still not knowing what will happen to his software especally DeskDebug.

And it may be useful to have several mirrows to avoid situations as with APDL.

Would be great if we would manage it to setup a website with all old RISC OS software in optimal case with source and resources available but it is difficulty to get this.

Hasn’t that already been done?

For source code, use one of the Cloud Git repositories, or perhaps look at the ROOL site. As Theo pointed out when this came up before, the DR plans at GitHub, GitLab, SourceForge or the like are almost certainly in a very different league to any one-person RISC OS outfit (no matter how good their intent), and thanks to the distributed nature of Git, it doesn’t have to be “forever”: it just has to be “long enough after your own backups failed to be able to restore them”, or your backups need to be good enough that if the cloud site vanishes, you can set up another site before your backups also fail.

In effect, you’re gambling on the unlikelihood of the cloud service and your cloned copies going AWOL on the same night.

And then encourage members of the community to clone stuff from the site, to reduce that risk still further.

On GitHub, we already have Paolo’s project and riscos.info’s GIT project, if people want to band together (or just set up a personal project and tag it “RISC OS”).

And there may be legal questions.

Oh, yes.

I’ve been collecting “PD” software since I started writing the Archive PD Column in 2003 or so, and carried on after our ways parted as new releases were always useful for filling a few column inches in The WROCC. I must have a couple of thousand titles here, in various versions. Most of it can’t be distributed, because of the licence (or lack of). It’s depressing how much “free” software actively forbids third-party distribution in the licenses.

Which is why I keep on banging on about Open Sourcing things. It’s important, and you don’t know when it could be too late to sort it out.

But for the stuff that is “lost”, the Software Preservation Project (see the London Show, or WROCC’s March Meeting) apparently have secure archives which are not public. For now, that’s probably the best bet: a central repository of stuff that can’t be distributed, in the hope that one day it can be.

Let’s not re-invent the wheel again. If the existing projects are happy to take the additional load on board, let’s consolidate what we have instead of spreading things ever thinner.

I think this thread has become confused with this thread https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/16563 I replied in the wrong thread, and people have carried on from there.

I will be starting work on releasing old volumes of Archive this winter, from the first volume onwards.

I knew if I waited long enough, I wouldn’t have to pay for it! How long would that be?

Why RISC OS stuff is getting missed by Archive.org consistently I do not know.

In the case of APDL it was because they asked Archive.org not to archive it. Why I don’t know!

The presumably means that the – even more ‘unavailable’ – !Composition link has gone. It contiunes to baffle me that this has been languishing, hidden away from use or development! I still use my copy quite often but guess many more recent users of RO don’t even know it existed, let alone what it can do.

The refusal to allow anyone to archive it fits in with the decades-long lack of any progress with that and other software. Why, heaven knows!. No wonder Rob D. has washed his hands of RO!

Not helped by a certain squirrel milker, being to tight to hand over a few nuts for web hosting. ;)

I can’t remember if there’s been much discussion of the Acorn Preservation group on here — most of the discussion has been in the ABUG talks (and ‘hallway track’ between talks) and Discord server.

There are a couple of issues re. APDL stuff…

- The CDs they used were of quite poor quality. Notably they were mastered without a ‘leadout’, and seem to fail from the last written block. Sometimes this is repairable (e.g. if it’s a file from !System), other times not.

- My strongest recollection of APDL from Back In The Day was of buying used copies of their software, asking questions in the newsgroups, and receiving very stern emails from the two Daves (Bradforth and Holden) in response.

While I wouldn’t say no to an offer of some APDL software, I wouldn’t be putting it on a public archive without a written okay from the current copyright holder. Same goes for the APDL website.

If web hosting is needed, I can arrange it … though I see I’m far from the first to offer that in this thread!

If anyone’s curious what we’ve managed to archive thus far, there’s a list here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13j6EpLZ5MunImiRoQ6kCnV8cgd4w0aWzBr-hvAXcrrc/

To give an explanation of how this works… it’s like the Amiga preservation efforts. Someone provides a disk, we image it. If we already had a copy then we send the best available copy back. In this way, you can only get the archived file if you already had it (or a corrupted disk which was obviously the thing we archived). You can call it a ‘backup service’ if you like.

If we can make contact with the copyright holders and obtain permission to distribute — then it goes on archive.org. Brewster Kahle, Jason Scott and team are far better at keeping things online (and far better resourced) than I am!

It is a disappointing situation — a lot of the ownership of RISC OS software is tied up in a small number of people, who either don’t have time, or the willingness to do anything with it… I’ve helped a few people get their old data back through working on APT, and the sticking point is almost always getting hold of a working copy of the software used to create it.

Just to make sure all my bases are covered… as far as APT’s concerned, if some item of software is available to buy, it’s not going on any public archive unless there’s a distribution licence on file…

Cheers
Phil.

and receiving very stern emails

Yeah, it’s as if the concept of the first sale doctrine never existed…

But, yes, it seems a lot of stuff has been lost to time due to sources bring lost, people no longer around, or it just being too much of a pain to do something.

Thank god the power apps (PhotoDesk, Artworks, Impression ¹) were rescued and continue to be available.

¹ I don’t count OvationPro as David is still around. ;)

A mirror. http://apdl.davidhill.co

All the links down the left side still point to the original site, so only the homepage is mirrored.