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***UPDATE [04/02/04]***
Well, the only change this time is a cosmetic one. After I changed the background from white to black, someone wrote me to say that they didn't mind that change much, but it would be nice if the links and some other colored text were changed with the background. They suggested amber or green - ala the old monochromatic monitors - and I liked the suggestion, but I was too lazy to implement it earlier. Let me know if you find these new colors exceptionally more annoying.

`Cha Jane!

***UPDATE [01/17/04]***
If you've been here before, I apologize for the jarring change of "color". From some design stuff I've read elsewhere, white text on black background is generally a better combination than black text on white background. So, I'm trying it out.

If it's horribly bad for you to look at, let me know. Otherwise, I think I'll keep the new "look".

Anyway, the only other addition is a reply I received with some help from the guy who needed help with information for a motherboard he has and a couple new questions.

***UPDATE [11/29/03]***
So I've set up a new page for people who've sent me mail about equipment which isn't included in the Total Hardware 1999 collection. Hopefully someone else with more information will happen across my site and be able to help these people more than I or the web can. So, check it out if you think you may be able to be of assistance to these people and then email me and I'll post what information you have so that the original asker and others may be helped.

I've also put up a file which is supposed to be a fix to some of the pages that cause 404 and other errors. Hope this can be of help to you.

***UPDATE [03/29/03]***
Yes, I know, 4 to 5 months between updates is a long time. However, my excuse is that there really hasn't been much need to update the site. Most of the links work, though some are in the wrong category, but you'll be able to find the info you need either way.

The big news is that I've been contacted by the General Manager (!) of a company that is hosting a mirror of the collection on their servers. He says that they would like to know some of the copyright information so that they can maybe license the Total Hardware 1999 collection for redistribution. This is awesome! If we can find whoever owns the copyright on it, we could potentially never have to worry about looking over our shoulders with this collection (not that I am, anymore...as far as I'm concerned, it's pretty old, and they haven't come forth yet, so, bleh).

Anyway, if you have one of the original Total Hardware collections on CDROM and you could scan the top of the CD or jewel case artwork in a scanner or if you could give us an ISBN number or something so that this gentleman can contact the copyright holders, that would be awesome. Just email your image (or, preferably, a link to it) to the address on my Contact page.

Muchas gracias! (I took some Spanish last quarter in school ;-) but I don't want to take the time to put in the accentos)

***UPDATE [11/30/02]***
Another link added today. This one is from Dataspace Systems. I received mail from one of their employees saying that the Total Hardware 1999 collection had helped them out when working with a customer. In return, they provided space for a mirror. They were not required to do this (no one is) but it was such a nice gesture that I thought I'd write about it here. Other places like www.eztechstuff.com, www.pley.org, and www.van-diepen.com have done similar things. So, if you're at a company that finds this collection helpful and you'd like to do something in return (remember: you don't HAVE to, it's just a nice thing to do) and you've got the webspace available, put up a mirror.

(Actually, I could use a mirror of th99.tar.bz2 or th99.rar moreso than the uncompressed-with-images version, but those are good, too! ;-))

Also, I've prepared a new directory for my TotalHardware 1999 page at http://www.osuweb.net/~ahaning/totalhardware99/ which should make it easier for me to organize the stuff in my account. The old links will work for now, but please update them and make the new ones accordingly. After a while, I'll remove the old page, and make the old files links to the new ones. Then, when everyone's forgotten about the old links, I'll remove the old files, and things will be all good.

Thanks all!

***UPDATE [10/19/02]***
Alright, thanks to the admin that alerted me to the c't article referring to our sites, I now have a scanned copy of the page where the link is listsd: http://www.osuweb.net/~ahaning/ct.png. It's close to the bottom of the page on the left side. Yatta! ;-) He or she was also so kind as to set up another host over on that side of the rock for us. Danke!

***UPDATE [10/05/02]***
I recently received an email from the admin of one of the servers that hosts one of the Total Hardware 1999 mirrors. The mail mentioned that our sites were linked to by c't, the largest-selling computer technology magazine in Germany. You can see the link here[http://www.heise.de/ct/02/20/urls/]. Scroll down to #38. :-) I don't brag too often, but that's just too cool. Danka c't! (Though, they could have done something other than linking to the .rar file!)

Danka to you, too, user!

(Yes, I suck at German.)

***UPDATE [08/23/02]***
There have been some new download links added recently. Including copies of the archive with thumbnails precreated. One is a .tar.bz2 file and the other is a RAR'ed CD image. Please feel free to mirror these as you see fit and let me know, if you'd like a link on this page.

Also, there's a little problem which I should have brought up before, but I wasn't so sure that it was a problem. Some of the files named th99free.tar.gz and th99free.tar.bz2 are not what I believe to be complete. If you find that something doesn't work quite right in your copy, you might want to try downloading th99free.tar.gz or th99free.tar.bz2 from the opensource.cis.ohio-state.edu (previously linked to as freedom.cis.ohio-state.edu...same box, different name) links on the download page. If you're not sure if you have a copy that's as complete as I know of, you can check the file size. If yours is slightly smaller than the one on opensource.cis.ohio-state.edu, then it might not be the same. For a more definite method of checking, here are the md5sums and sizes (in bytes) for what I'll call the "good" copies:

2ba317f492712b0e896d6b6490498275 9284318 th99free.tar.gz
96e5645a8c3f5dc65c24fe3980eb0d2b 5827915 th99free.tar.bz2

And here's ones I've seen on other hosts:

9de7e16f7b36f8f04ce608887bae0e75 9284317 th99free.tar.gz
eb3ef24737b67f9b67ba6509bca5cccf 5822964 th99free.tar.bz2

As you can see, the difference (in size) is VERY small. So, if everything's working well for you now and you're not hosting a mirror, don't worry about it. If you are hosting a mirror and you wouldn't mind downloading it again, please go get a copy from the opensource.cis.ohio-state.edu host, as that's more of a "master" copy. If you're just looking to download a copy for personal use, please use one of the mirrors, so as to distribute the load. Any questions? Let me know!

Thanks!

***UPDATE [07/18/02]***
Last Sunday, the freedom.cis.ohio-state.edu host had a disk crash, so you may have noticed that it's been unavailable for the past week if you've been trying to get the full copy with images.

At that time, I had uploaded a 140MB copy that included all of the thumbnails already created. It was a .tar.bz2 file, rather than a .rar, as well, so that only GNU tools were required. I had not yet linked to it, as it's quite a large file, and I hadn't yet even one other mirror of it available. There was one person (to whom I had given a link) trying to download it, but most of the way through the download, the disk crashed, so he was unable to finish. Hopefully, we'll have the server back up by next week...we'll see.

If you'd like to host a copy of the 140MB .tar.bz2 file, let me know and I'll give you a link.

Thanks.

***UPDATE [06/10/02]***
I believe I'm (finally) ready to release a version of the Total Hardware 1999 collection with images that doesn't require any time to make thumbnails. It should just be an "uncompress and go" sort of thing. However, there are some files that appear to be missing. I ran a program called Linklint against a local copy and some files turned up missing. When I checked the linking files manually, it appears that there might actually be some images missing. I know it sounds silly, but this is unacceptable to me (e.g. I won't sleep until this is resolved!). If you have an actual original (not one you've downloaded from me) Total Hardware 1999 CDROM and you'd like to check to see if the files are missing in the original, you can see Linklint's output here (HINT: Scroll to the bottom. Six files appear to be missing.)

The other thing I'm rather in need of is a mirror. The freedom.cis.ohio-state.edu host is not really setup for hosting this sort of file, and I'd rather not get in trouble for hosting huge files, like I already am! I'd like to get at least one mirror other than the freedom.cis.ohio-state.edu one (it's not up there yet, but I plan on putting it there once I have another mirror or two). So, if you've got a server online with ~140MB free, and you'd like to host this file, check the contact page, and get in touch with me. Thanks!