Aminet is the world's largest archive of
AmigaThe Amiga was a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer. Commodore International bought Amiga Corporation and introduced the machine to the market in 1985...
-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities'
FTPFile Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to exchange and manipulate files over a TCP/IP based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications...
sites, and is now available on
CD-ROMCD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback, the 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data. CD-ROMs are popularly used to...
and on the web.
In January, 1992 Swiss student
Urban MüllerUrban Dominik Müller is a computer programmer. He is the creator of the Aminet Amiga archive, the original author of the XPK compression library and the creator of the brainfuck programming language. He is now employed at search.ch, a Swiss search engine....
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.
Aminet is the world's largest archive of
AmigaThe Amiga was a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer. Commodore International bought Amiga Corporation and introduced the machine to the market in 1985...
-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities'
FTPFile Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to exchange and manipulate files over a TCP/IP based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications...
sites, and is now available on
CD-ROMCD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback, the 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data. CD-ROMs are popularly used to...
and on the web.
History
In January, 1992 Swiss student
Urban MüllerUrban Dominik Müller is a computer programmer. He is the creator of the Aminet Amiga archive, the original author of the XPK compression library and the creator of the brainfuck programming language. He is now employed at search.ch, a Swiss search engine....
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. Reports of daily additions to this software archive were posted automatically to
UsenetUsenet, a portmanteau of "user" and "network" , is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It evolved from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name....
(de.comp.sys.amiga.archive), or could be requested as an email newsletter. Most of the programs on Aminet were
public domainThe public domain is a range of abstract materials—commonly referred to as intellectual property—which are not owned or controlled by anyone. The term indicates that these materials are therefore "public property", and available for anyone to use for any purpose...
or
sharewareThe term shareware, popularized by Bob Wallace, refers to proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a...
, 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 4AmigaOS 4 is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code and some on version 3.9. "The Final Update" was released in 24 December 2006 after five years of development by the Belgian company Hyperion Entertainment under...
and the AROS Archives, which archives software for
AROSAros may refer to:Aros-Eros-Cupid-AmorIt is believed that the origins above led Saint Valentines enthusiasts to appoint the Roman god Cupid as the patron of Valentine's day -- that is the story of Lupercalia and the love and romance associatied with the St. Valentine's legends.Cupid is also known...
.
Aminet was the first attempt by an internet community 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.
Until around 1996, Aminet was the largest public archive of software for any platform. When the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
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
MorphOSMorphOS is a computer operating system . It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC -processor-based computer, most models of PPC-accelerator-equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi Firmware, including the EFIKA...
, 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 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 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.
External links