New home for Focus on OS/2 articles

October 05, 2001 by Walter Metcalf

Hello everyone,

Slightly more than two weeks have passed since I received the email from About informing me that Focus on OS/2 had been terminated. Since I knew it was against About's policy to forward email sent to a cancelled site or Guide, I published a note on the web explaining what had happened with the sole intention of preventing you my readers from drawing the wrong conclusion from the sudden disappearance of my site. I didn't want you to think that I had suddenly given up on you, or worse, that I had died.

I was completely unprepared for what happened next. I was flooded with email expressing appreciation for my site over the past three years and concern that the articles I had written would be lost; several were even concerned that the OS/2 world might lose me as a contributor.

As you might imagine, having a project in which you have invested 3 years of your life abrupted terminated and taken down has a powerful emotional impact. Your kindness during this time, as well as your support and desire to see my work continue has done a great deal to soften this blow. I thank each of you who has taken the time to write me from the bottom of my heart.

Now for my announcement.

Two editors contacted me within minutes of my publication of the "Farewell to Focus on OS/2" note. I am happy to report that I have reached mutually satisfactory arrangements with both editors and their respective publications to begin writing for them beginning in May. These publications are "VOICE Newsletter", published by VOICE, and "Extended Attributes", published by POSSI, the Phoenix OS/2 Society.

Initially, at least, I'll aim for an article in every issue of EA--in other words, every other month, and another article in every other issue of the VOICE Newsletter. Every article I write, regardless of where it gets published, will also go online in my personal web site, and hopefully on also on Warp Doctor. (I'll be keeping the copyright of all my articles; in addition both Mark Dodel of the VOICE Newsletter and Esther Schindler of EA have generously given me express permission to keep them online.) More details on that later. These will be added to the Focus on OS/2 articles which I have already started uploading to my personal web site.

(Eventually I want to accumulate a complete library of my articles online for the benefit of anyone who may find them useful. I've tentatively named this library, "Walter's OS/2 Treasury". I'll publish the URL for my personal web site copy after I've cleaned it up a bit more and created a front page for my articles.)

Finally, I wish I could respond positively to the many generous offers that were made. However, it quickly became clear that wasn't going to be possible. Let me just express my thanks once again to all who wrote me, and especially to those who found my contributions to the OS/2 community worth preserving, and were willing to devote some of their own valuable server resources to help make it happen. This has been a truly humbling experience.


Walter

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Walter Metcalf
email: walter.os2@home.com
OS/2 Lives On!
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