Subject: Aminet hits 5000 files Today, September 24 1993, 20 months after its foundation, Aminet has hit a total number of 5000 online files. I'll seize that opportunity to talk about how Aminet became what it is today, give you a few statistics about current usage and size, provide some outlooks and finally thank the many people involved in the creation of Aminet. THE HISTORY ----------- What would you expect to become of a software archive that is run on a borrowed 25 MHz 68030 computer at the end of the world (ie. Switzerland) with only 50MB of harddisk space available for uploads? A giant flop, of course. Well, this is how Aminet started. How can it be that it didn't just die before anyone ever heard of it? The secret is that it's not just any archive, but an Amiga archive. And Amiga users are unlike the users of any other computer in the world. In fact it is the user community that keeps the Amiga alive and kicking now that it has lost the technological lead it once had. And it was the user community that made that tiny little archive one of the biggest success stories on the history of Internet. When in January 92 I took over the small archive that the local students' club (ICU) ran on a computer donated by Commodore Switzerland, I saw that 40 users logged in per day. I was impressed. Hey, that was happening unnoticed while we were using that computer for mail, news and FTP. But hell, 40 users a day are 280 per week, that's quite an audience, worth taking some effort. So I wrote the .readme collector, still the one thing that defines our archive. It generated the RECENT and SHORT file every night. And amazingly many uploaders took the extra work of writing the special .readme files needed to generate those file lists. Slowly, the site started getting popular. Then, in April, came the ab20 shutdown. People were desperate to get a replacement, and many turned to amiga.physik. Too many in fact. We had to install a user limit. And 50MB of disk space may have been appropriate for a small unknown site in Switzerland, but for taking over all traffic the job from the 250MB ab20 which had ruled Amiga FTP before? This could have been the quick death of a promising archive since the majority of users would have had to use another. But not on the Amiga. I asked my friends on the #amiga channel of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) whether they had the resources to run a mirror of our site. One of them had: Peter Sjostrom. First of May 92 was the moment when amiga.physik became Aminet, a collection if interconnected FTP sites. I wrote some mirroring scripts that allowed very frequent updates and forwarded uploads made to his site in Sweden, making the two sites nearly equivalent. This helped with our bandwidth problem, but the hard disk space was still too small; we had to throw away files all the time to make room for new ones. We had no money for a bigger disk. But we had the user community. I placed a message in the login text, and within a month we had enough cash for a 1.5G harddisk Mike Schwartz cheaply bought for us in the USA. Half of that money came from Walnut Creek Inc., the company that had made the ab20 CDROM. Quite a courageous step back then, nobody knew what would become of Aminet. Still, far more people wanted to log into amiga.physik than could, but more and more people started mirroring our site, even if they only could afford to keep the most recent 50MB online. That finally brought Aminet on the road to success. More downloads created more uploads, which created more downloads and so on. Breakthrough. With the increased number of uploads, my workload got bigger and bigger, but I got help from Chris Schneider when I needed it. Aminet started running smoothly for quite a while. Then came the catastrophe: Because of the significant traffic our site created alone, we were ordered by the university to shut down the archive at amiga.physik in June 93. Fortunately, Chris Myers from wuarchive offered me an account and enough disk space so I could move the Aminet main site there. Isn't the Net a wonderful thing? Now we can easily administer an archive 6000 miles away from our home country. Just recently the A3000UX that used to be amiga.physik found a new home at EUnet, where it is now available to general public again, but only as a mirror this time. This is what happened so far, it's the violent history of the first 5000 uploads. In a way I'm glad we can expect the next 5000 to be a lot less exciting :) THE PRESENT ----------- Daily users: amiga.physik 1992: 40 wuarchive today : 1866 Aminet today : 10000 (estimated) Monthly downloads in thousands (wuarchive only): 1992 1993 May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 2 15 14 5 16 20 37 44 48 25 36 45 49 33 204 280 Bytes downloaded in August 93: 25G Monthly uploads (files): 1992 1993 Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 98 188 181 137 235 396 609 389 431 287 333 419 502 Subdir size in megabytes: (total: 883M) biz comm demo dev disk fish game gfx misc mods mus os20 os30 pix text util --- ---- ---- --- ---- ---- ---- --- ---- ---- --- ---- ---- --- ---- ---- 26 38 154 42 3 54 63 103 36 128 30 10 3 66 44 44 Number of files at each mirror Mirror Files ------ ----- ftp.wustl.edu 5029 ftp.cdrom.com 5021 ftp.luth.se 5019 ftp.doc.ic.ac.uk 5019 ftp.etsu.edu 4939 ftp.eunet.ch 4457 ftp.th-darmstadt.de 3889 ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de 3643 ftp.uni-oldenburg.de 1605 ftp.uni-kl.de 1218 litamiga.epfl.ch 1020 ftp.uni-paderborn.de 916 THE FUTURE ---------- There's a few things still coming up: - Find servers. No need to log into some FTP site and download the index file in order to find out where a specific file is. Some kind of Aminet-archie. - ADT 2.0. This is going to be a very easy-to-compile, easy-to-use frontend to Aminet. O plan to strongly encourage its use once it is finished. It will also include AmigaDOS, mail server and find server support. - Unification with the Fish series. Fred and I are currently talking about merging our two series, - More BBS accesses for users of the CD-ROM without net access who would like to contribute. CREDITS ------- There is a lot of people I have to thank, and I hope I don't forget anyone. I'd like to thank The uploaders for writing freely distributable software and taking the pain write readmes and to upload them The downloaders for restricting themselves from using the main site, which helped a lot during the amiga.physik time The mirror adms for taking most of the load from amiga.physik and keeping Internet traffic local thereby. The donors for donating about $900, saving Aminet from an early death Walnut Creek Inc for paying another $800, and making available the CD so cheaply, and giving free CD's to uploaders. Chris Schneider for doing much of the moderation work, writing the virus- checking LhA and the search-server (coming soon). Peter Sjostrom for running the very first mirror Brian Wright for running the first US mirror C= Switzerland for donating the A3000 that used to be amiga.physik Mike Schwartz for buying the HD for us Markus Wild for improving the amiga.physik ftpd Chris Myers for offering to move amiga.physik to wuarchive Martin Blatter for installing and administering amiga.physik Our university for supplying internet access for the site EUnet for giving amiga.physik a new home I hope you liked the service so far, and if you have any comments, wishes or ideas, feel free to contact me. Watch this space for the 10'000 file posting an estimated one year from now!