About Scot H.

This site was once one of the main repositories for practical problem solving for BeOS users. It was created and a managed by Scot Hacker (that’s me), author of The BeOS Bible. When Be, Inc. went under, I switched to Mac OS X and handed hosting and management of the Tip Server over to another BeOS user. In 2007, that person’s hosting situation dried up, and the site, consisting of around 700 tips from hundreds of contributors, was lost to history… or so it seemed.
After poking around, I realized – through pure luck or inattentiveness – that a MySQL copy of the database as last used was still sitting around on my web host. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a copy of the original site templates to go with the database. Though almost no one uses BeOS anymore, it killed me to think that the repository could be lost forever. For the first time in about five years, I pulled my antique x86 laptop out of the closet, booted it up, and… Yow! There was a copy of the site, in all of its HTML tables glory and late 90s ugliness.
I started converting the old site to WordPress, since WP is so perfect for this kind of thing. Initially, I intended to translate the old template into a WP theme for nostalgia’s sake, but the code behind the old site was so fugly I couldn’t bring myself to follow through. So I adopted a more modern (but ragged-looking) theme and went from there.
So the site’s up and running again, though it’s full of dead links to BeOS sites that no longer exist. Also, all of the inter-tip links are broken. Sorry.
If you’d like to help clean up the links or contribute new content, I’d really appreciate the assist. Contact me.
For information on how this site was originally served from a BeOS server using the Be filesystem (BFS) as a database, see the TrackerBase page.
Also: While digging through the old site archive, I found a pile of antique web ads for BeOS products and services. These are a great piece of nostalgia unto themselves, and I’ve decided to make them available as a tarball, for the morbidly curious.
Download antique BeOS Web ads
Check out old versions of this site on archive.org. Here’s a screenshot from 2002:
The Tip Server circa 2002

 

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