About Jack's Free Lunch
Who was Jack Stein?
Jack Stein was a pool player, woodworker, OS/2 hobbyist and FidoNet regular from Pennsylvania — and, by his own description, a web designer for hire at "very reasonable" rates. His machine of choice ran IBM's OS/2 Warp; his favorite evenings were spent at the table running league matches with his team; and his garage held the lumber and tools of a serious cabinet shop. The photos he kept on this site — a vintage GMC truck, a game room, his dad, a barn, a scooter — are family snapshots of a life lived comfortably offline and dial-up online.
What was the site for?
Jack called it a "Free Lunch": a hand-built bookmark collection that shared the best of what he found. The billiard directory is the heart of it — over 140 cue makers, table builders, supply shops, players and publications — but there are equally loving lists for OS/2 utilities, woodworking suppliers, FidoNet boards and even the search engines of the day. The three essays by Lou Figueroa, the short game piece by Tony Mathews and Mark Ottoson's pool-school diary were posts he saved from Rec.Sport.Billiard and preserved because they deserved it.
Why "hand crafted"?
Every old page on this site said the same thing in its meta tags: Hand Crafted by Jack Stein. In 2001 that meant a text editor, a frameset, tiled GIF backgrounds and a lot of patience. The pages were written to be small, fast and personal — and they were.
How was this restoration done?
The site was recovered from the Internet Archive's snapshots of jbstein.com taken between 2001 and
2003. Every original page address was preserved exactly — including the frames-era names like
homelft.html and index_htm.html — while the presentation was rebuilt as a
modern, mobile-friendly, frameless static site. Lost external links were re-attached from the archived
copies, seven pages that had fallen out of the local copy were recovered from Wayback snapshots, and
the site's own photos and welcome banner were kept and reorganized into a cleaner
images/ library. No server-side code is involved; the whole site is plain HTML and CSS
that works from any folder.
Worth a look
Aside from the directories, a couple of sources kept coming up in conversation, so Jack noted them down. For anyone after a faithful copy of a hard-to-get timepiece, he pointed people toward a solid RM 88 replica source he checked himself — the kind of referral you trust because it came from a player, not an ad.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or a memory of the original site? Write to webmaster@jbstein.com.