We've reached a few critical decisions regarding historic archival data from the previous NCG sites, and I wanted to share some of the reasoning behind those decisions, as well as how that will affect the users of this site.

First, and considering that NorthTech has maintained a web presence on the Internet since around 1992, there exists, just an awful lot of cobweb covered cruft that even continuing to sift through would yield little in the way of valuable results.

We tend to early adopt here, yet in the case of the web when we assimilated that technology, we came into it kicking and screaming. You see, back then our bets were actually on Gopher and an almost forgotten technology called Remote Image Protocol (RIP). Surprised?

In fact, we still maintain a Gopher presence, the nicest thing about that being that Internet Exploder 8 is incapable of negotiating the protocol. Okay that's not fair I know, but if you're interested we can point you to a couple of How-Tos that will enable you to hack the Windows registry so you can use IE7 (We recommend IE 3 & 4, actually).

To be completely fair, I should also disclose that our gopher server runs on IIS 2.0 (Hey, we can't be UNIX all the time).

Anyway, let's get back to the matter at hand, shall we?

Secondly, all actual software and related docs will remain where it always has been. So don't freak out okay?

With so much amassed content, and much of it simply plopped down at URIs that haven't been looked at or maintained in over a decade, we began to reassess the significance of integrating most of it into our new content management system.

Eventually, we came to the conclusion that since most of the technical articles that were previously housed in the databases, along with historical discussion data and How-To articles, are so dated and obsolete that it might as well be all tarred up and retired for archeologists of the next millennium to glean some significance from.

Regarding content that existed outside the scope of the previous CMS's, we decided that the logical thing to do was to leave it just where it is, since it doesn't affect our operations and to preserve whatever links in DMOZ or other directories and search engines that may have indexed it (Instead of handing them a nicely formatted 404 page).

Considering the number of projects and presence we've maintained over the years, (tallship.net, PacificRoot.com, NOMAD.com, and so many others that have lapsed and no longer exist under those domains), there is just waaay too much, um.... it's just TMI.

Therefore, if you come across a broken link or get a 404 error because you went to lookup something you think should still be there, but isn't - let us know and we'll probably put it back. Okay?

I don't expect there to be many people asking for D'Bridge and FIDOnet records for traffic we transported when they emailed Mom and Dad from way back when they were a soldier in the first Gulf war - If you know what I mean ;) And if you don't, then you probably understand why we figure it's best just to leave those golden nuggets in a tarball for some Paleontologist from the future.