Aminet

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Aminet is the world's largest archive of Amiga-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities' FTP sites, and is now available on CD-ROM and on the web.

[edit] History

In January, 1992 Swiss student Urban Müller took over a software archive that had been started by other members of a computer science students' club. Soon the archive became mirrored worldwide and in 1995 started being distributed on monthly CD-ROMs. [1] Reports of daily additions to this software archive were posted automatically to Usenet (de.comp.sys.amiga.archive), or could be requested as an email newsletter. Most of the programs on Aminet were public domain or shareware, but software companies made updates and demo versions of their programs available as well. Now Aminet is complemented by OS4Depot, which archives non-commercial and free software for AmigaOS 4.0.

Aminet was the first attempt of a community in internet to create a centralized public archive maintained by the users themselves, and to keep the community united and free to download new open source software, new program demo releases, patches and localization of Amiga programs (AmigaOS and its modern programs are free to be localized by any single user into any country language). Its creation predates of various years any Linux archive or PC archive or archives for other platforms, and perhaps Aminet was so famous and noteworthy at its first appearance that the experience of Aminet was used as model for any subsequent public archive for any platform.

It received a total wide acceptance in the Amiga community as the de-facto standard archive to publish any kind of software and Amiga related multimedia, and it was so appreciated that it is still used today over any other archive such as OS4Depot or AROS Depot.

Until around 1996, Aminet was the largest public archive of software for any platform. When the Internet explosion took place from 1996 to 1999, Aminet rapidly fell behind the emerging massive PC archives.

During 2004 the main Aminet mirror suffered from a harddisk crash and many people considered the whole effort as dead. Around the same time Nicolas Mendoza was setting up a modernized interface for Aminet that indexed Aminet and provided advanced searching features and a modern interface to navigate the tree coined Amirepo. He also posted public suggestions on how to help improving Aminet by adding tags for architectures to help catalog the tree that now consisted of MorphOS, AmigaOS 4 and Amithlon files, in addition to the already existing M68K, PowerUP and WarpOS files. He also suggested on measures to add proper dependencies to complement and replace the existing Requires field. This also in a future goal of letting Aminet function as a repository for package management systems similar to Debian's APT/DPKG and Red Hats' RPM. He tried to contact individuals like Matthias Scheler and Urban Müller which was known to maintain Aminet, but to no avail.

In the meantime Björn Hagström started up OS4Depot as an AmigaOS 4 only repository.

In the end of 2004 Christoph Gutjahr made contact with Urban Müller and set up a team to continue the Aminet effort. Urban Müller provided a new main mirror site and the backlog of packages were added in. The Amirepo interface of Nicolas Mendoza was integrated and Aminet was officially up and going again in February 2005. During 2005 the uploads [2] started getting going again and in November 2005 most of ambiguous files and .readme files were sorted out by Gutjahr and Mendoza finally sanitizing the repository. The team has been making lots of changes gradually [3]. The number of uploads in 2005 are going to surpass the number of 2003 and Aminet can again be described as alive and kicking.