Today, I was wondering what J.R. Whipple was off to these days. Oh,
no worry, I can just visit jrwhipple.com and see if he is still up
to the full time RVing. So I go there, and I am met
with… disappointment. There’s just a landing page for a domain name
that no longer has any site registered to it. Searching for
J.R. Whipple is also a disappointment. Nowhere in the results is
anyone relevant to the original J.R. Whipple that I knew.
20191209/DuckDuckGo j.r. whipple
broken/http://jrwhipple.com/
So, this is how the website of a small-company but ambitious computer person ends. Basically their entire identity gets wiped off the face of the planet, and nobody really cares about them anymore, lest remember them, and much less keep their historic site working.
So, for punctual accuracy, nostalgia, and simply a trip down memory lane, here i go visit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. A particularly interesting discovery here is a Windows extension called “ultra-Windows” that adds virtual desktop support into your Windows XP computer.
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20160110115402/http://jrwhipple.com/
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20100117035108/http://jrwhipple.com/
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20061118111150/http://www.jrwhipple.com/index.html
And, finally, the lead-up to the final fate of the website. First:
Our Server has suffered serious technical issues and our web site is currently offline.
Until we are able to restore this site, please visit The Find-It Page
And the Find-It Page fails to impress, most of the useful information is simply not there.
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20161005215722/http://jrwhipple.com/
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20161025221635/http://www.jrwhipple.com/findit/index.html
Looking further into the present, things get ever worse. That prognosis of the broken website continues exactly the same for another two years.
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20180329054256/http://jrwhipple.com/
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20181107214559/http://jrwhipple.com/
Next even the page warning of the serious crash is now longer showing, succumbing to an even more serious error. And that’s the end of it.
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20190723184102/http://jrwhipple.com/
20191209/https://web.archive.org/web/20191209161525/http://jrwhipple.com/
J.R. Whipple was indeed a considerable for me early in my electronics hobby, first and foremost giving professional and skillful device for working with PC internals. Specifically, that you must use a grounding strap and anti-static mat. J.R. Whipple was also quite an influence in being a high-tech computer guy who at the same time also carried quite the reputation of a southwestern cowboy who you might not expect to know very much about technology. By all means, an influential character in the personal dimension, by being curiously uncommon in the tech industry. But, like J.R. Whipple said himself on his site:
All good things must pass. J.R. has retired from the computer industry, and will soon be a full-time RVer.
And, well, now it’s almost 4 years after becoming a full-time RVer, and without the site or any other traces of contact, we have no other way of knowing what he’s off to next.