Dan Palka, who took over the Info-Mac name and domain when I shut down the original Info-Mac nearly five years ago (see "The Info-Mac Network Retires," 19 December 2005), tells me that he and a bunch of contributors have now brought almost the entire collection of Info-Mac Digests back online in a modern system. The end result is a largely complete archive of postings from 1984 through 2002, collected from a variety of different sources. The main holes occur in 1992 and in 1995, so if you have Info-Mac Digests from those years, let the current Info-Mac folks know or tell me and I'll pass things on.

I'm a great believer in making old information available, not so much because it's useful in the way that current information is, but because you can never anticipate just how you'll want to use it. For instance, we've been asked a number of times about when certain software came out, because if it was before a particular date, it would qualify as prior art in invalidating a patent (and these patents are almost always for something painfully obvious). If there's something in the Mac past that you've been wondering about, you can search all the old Info-Mac Digests.

Along with all this newly restored historical information (the Info-Mac Archive of software is also back online and searchable, with files last added as of 2005), the modern Info-Mac comprises a discussion forum, blog, industry headline list, classified ad section, and buyer's guide.