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The history of Aminet
- 1991: ICU, a club of swiss computer science students, uses an
Amiga 3000UX donated by Commodore Switzerland to host a FTP archive at
amiga.physik.unizh.ch. In addition to offering many packages for
AmigaOS, the server also acts as the official Amiga UNIX anon ftp
site. About 40 users log in each day.
- January 1992: Urban Dominik Müller is appointed as the
administrator of said archive and immediately introduces the .readme
collector, the one thing that defines Aminet to this day. On January
16th, the new FTP archive is
announced on
comp.sys.amiga.misc.
- April 1992: After the most popular Amiga software archive at
ab20.larc.nasa.gov is taken offline, its users are switching to other
FTP servers - many of them to amiga.physik. The server is unable to
handle the increased traffic, that’s why Swedish Amiga user Peter
Sjostrom establishes the first mirror at ftp.ludd.luth.se. More and
more mirrors are added, in December 1992 the regular announcements
posted to Usenet already list 8 international
mirrors.
- August 1992: Urban Müller
releases the first version of ‘Aminet
Download Tool’ (ADT), a FTP frontend that offers comfortable features
like searching for files and displaying recent uploads.
- June 1993: The main server generates too much traffic and has
to go offline.
- July 1993: Chris Myers from Washington University provides an
account and sufficient disk space at wuarchive.wustl.edu, which
becomes the new home of Aminet
for more than a decade.
- September 1993: From now on, files uploaded to Aminet are being
virus checked.
- September 1993: The original A3000UX server is
back, it now acts as a
mirror and is available at ftp.eunet.ch.
- May 1994: The
Aminet-On-Disk
service is introduced. Users without internet access can now order
single Aminet files, per-directory subscriptions or a whole month of
Aminet uploads on floppy disks or similar media.
- May 1994: Aminet goes WWW: The first web
interface for Aminet goes
online at ftp.wustl.edu/~aminet/. The logo was chosen by Aminet users
from all
submissions
to the Aminet logo contest.
- October 1995: Starting with Aminet CD
8,
CDs are now released bimonthly. About 100 MB of new software gets
uploaded to Aminet each month.
- May 1996: Aminet hits 30,000
files and is now regarded
as the the world’s largest collection of freely distributable
software - for any computer system.
- December 1997: Aminet’s most successful year comes to an end:
from January to December 1997, nearly 13000 packages have been
uploaded.
- March 1999: Due to continued file system troubles on wustl.edu,
the Aminet main site moves to
ftp.uni-paderborn.de, a mirror maintained by co-admin Matthias
Scheler.
- March 2000: The harddisk of the German main server dies, so
Aminet moves back to wustl.edu.
- January 2003: Richard Small from Aminet’s distributor GTI
announces
that Aminet CD 52 will be the last in the series.
- September 2004: wuarchive.wustl.edu, the server hosting the
main Aminet mirror, has hardware problems and goes
offline.
As all uploads are processed on this server, Aminet does not accept
new uploads for now.
- November 2004: wuarchive.wustl.edu is back
online.
Unfortunately, the backups used to restore the Aminet account are old
and incomplete: Uploads are still not working.
- February 2005: Urban Müller establishes a new main
server at
ch.aminet.net. Aminet uses a completely new Web interface now, written
by Nicolas Mendoza. The main server is accepting uploads again, though
the mirrors are not updated yet. Several new administrators are taken
on board. Matthias Scheler, Aminet co-admin for more than ten years,
leaves the Aminet team.
- February 2007: Suffering from neverending problems with the
current main server, the Aminet team decides to move to a new
location: the new server is located in
California and is provided by team member Nicolas Mendoza.
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