User avatar
leighb2282

Posted Mon Jan 15, 2018 9:57 pm

Hey folks, anyone else seeing Aminet currently down?

is this a regular occurrence? impending amiga-related doom?

HELP! *RUNS AROUND PANICKING* :o
Screenshot from 2018-01-15 20-56-09.png

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:01 pm

It is indeed down, but I'm sure it'll be back up tomorrow. I have seen this a few times over the past couple of years. I wouldn't worry.

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:29 pm

I'm of the mindset that despite what a great many seem to think, that stuff on the internet is not there forever. The second the domain stops getting paid, kiss the history goodbye. Site owner kicks the bucket, bills stop getting paid, won't even get a warning. It's probably very important for certain sites to give the keys to a couple others, in case of those scenarios. That being said, I'm sure Aminet of all places is not going anywhere anytime soon. No matter the bills, someone somewhere would step up and make sure that place continues to run.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:40 pm

Indeed. I have a feeling it has been copied a few times over but who knows where. Hell, I learned recently that even Fred Fish was friends with the Aminet guys and sold Aminet CD-ROMs in the 90s. Obviously, the files there are growing still...

But yeah, it's true, Shot. ISPs like mine only let you pre-pay 2 years in advance. I feel like a long time ago they would let you pay for a 10-year plan. Not anymore. It does take constant care.

People always used to say "screw paper, digital is forever!" I beg to differ. I still have magazines from the 1980s, and they look great. There are no digital versions of them out there. Other than the wayback machine or archive.org... and those don't support downloads. They just scrape front-end HTML and some images.

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:39 pm

Part of the reason why I'm still a 35mm photography guy, all the way. Many reasons for that, but one of them is that even the almighty Google might just end up throwing away your thousands of images you've never really looked at someday. Pretty sure the last decade is going to be lost in time for the average person and their way of life... Obviously important events and things will hopefully be archived somewhere and live on, but representation of an average life, not a chance for its survival, not enough printed images anymore.

User avatar
leighb2282

Posted Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:58 pm

intric8 wrote:Indeed. I have a feeling it has been copied a few times over but who knows where. Hell, I learned recently that even Fred Fish was friends with the Aminet guys and sold Aminet CD-ROMs in the 90s. Obviously, the files there are growing still...

But yeah, it's true, Shot. ISPs like mine only let you pre-pay 2 years in advance. I feel like a long time ago they would let you pay for a 10-year plan. Not anymore. It does take constant care.

People always used to say "screw paper, digital is forever!" I beg to differ. I still have magazines from the 1980s, and they look great. There are no digital versions of them out there. Other than the wayback machine or archive.org... and those don't support downloads. They just scrape front-end HTML and some images.
Ok to go on a tangent, are Fred Fish disks really anything useful? I have a CD with about 800 of the disks contents on it and am wondering if anything on them is particularly useful and worth a look?

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Tue Jan 16, 2018 12:23 am

Depends on what kind of system you have. If it's of the original variety (1000, 500, 2000) then it's one of the most valuable resources you'll ever have, if you're into power using. There are utilities there that will match the 1200's Aminet arsenal any day of the week. 8 color Magic Workbench's in 1.3, etc, tools to reboot your machine into NTSC/PAL modes, memory savors, disk repair tools, you name it... If you have an idea for what you're looking for and search the contents of the disk, then you can find that disk and you'll have a lot of power at your hands... And most of it has never been uploaded to Aminet (individual programs, the disks themselves are there). A thousand disks of freeware/shareware. I mean some of it is for later Amiga's, but by that point I'm sure a lot of it was going up on Aminet. So if you have a newer Amiga, probably not much use there, older Amiga, hell of a lot.

User avatar
leighb2282

Posted Tue Jan 16, 2018 12:36 am

Shot97 wrote:Depends on what kind of system you have. If it's of the original variety (1000, 500, 2000) then it's one of the most valuable resources you'll ever have, if you're into power using. There are utilities there that will match the 1200's Aminet arsenal any day of the week. 8 color Magic Workbench's in 1.3, etc, tools to reboot your machine into NTSC/PAL modes, memory savors, disk repair tools, you name it... If you have an idea for what you're looking for and search the contents of the disk, then you can find that disk and you'll have a lot of power at your hands... And most of it has never been uploaded to Aminet (individual programs, the disks themselves are there). A thousand disks of freeware/shareware. I mean some of it is for later Amiga's, but by that point I'm sure a lot of it was going up on Aminet. So if you have a newer Amiga, probably not much use there, older Amiga, hell of a lot.
I actually found the site below which gives a list of i think all the disks contents, holy crap are you right when you say its valuable! already making a list of the ones I want to get from the cD

http://www.amiga-stuff.com/pd/fish.html

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Tue Jan 16, 2018 8:06 am

And it's up.
Ok to go on a tangent, are Fred Fish disks really anything useful? I have a CD with about 800 of the disks contents on it and am wondering if anything on them is particularly useful and worth a look?
Cool. Is that CD archived someplace? I hope.

I agree with the thoughts here, digital stuff is not forever. I have had digital downloads of games in the past go extinct because the service that sold them went under and now the games can no longer be activated or installed fresh.

I wonder what will happen if Sony ever decides that it does not want to continue hosting Playstation 3 titles that are digital only. I realize that is not likely as you can still download your purchases from the PSP era but just the same I prefer a hard copy of everything. Digital images, I keep my self on multiple backup devices, including optical disks that are proven for archival life because regular CDRs can and do fail faster then floppy disks sometimes. I don't trust Google with anything. They have shown over the years that they don't care about your stuff on their servers when they decide to shut something down.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jan 16, 2018 10:10 am

Part of the reason why I'm still a 35mm photography guy, all the way.
Take care there. My dad was an exceptional amatuer photographer in the late 1970s. He had some sets of photos published in two different magazines back then.

Forty years later, his boxes of slides are mildewed. Many of the images are ruined. The slides and negatives were all put into sleeves and/or boxed. But it didn't matter. Many of the non-mildewed images have actually faded, too. They were all boxed and stored away for years and years. But they weren't put in a perfectly climate controlled environment. And they did suffer. I still have thousands that have been transferred to digital (he was worried they'd all be lost forever and paid a service to do the transfer). Many are not great anymore, unfortunately. They look like they've been filtered by instagram or something. But, for me, that's OK I guess. I get to see him and my mom when they were younger and that's what matters...
And most of it has never been uploaded to Aminet (individual programs, the disks themselves are there).
I've still been working on the Fred Fish archive project in the background. I brought in one of the best engineers I know to try and assist (we're going to do a work/barter swap). I'm going to share some of that work here this week and get all of your personal opinions and feedback on if I should still do this and/or how to improve my concepts. I have discovered that every single individual program from the disks have been uploaded to Aminet individually, in addition to the entire disks. We searched for some of the filenames mentioned in each disk's descriptions (without extensions) and were able to find them on Aminet. That surprised me. You have to know exactly what you're looking for - this is Aminet's biggest failing from a Search perspective. They don't scrape the program descriptions. You literally have to know the program/file names. If you know exactly what you're looking for, though, it's great. If you want to "discover" something, you need to do that elsewhere. That's the key piece of this I think we might be able to vastly improve over here, and expose a ton of software to people that didn't even know it existed. Searching an 800-paged text file is one way, but I do think we could improve on that.

Plus - nearly all of the Fred Fish history has been lost to html scrapers on the wayback machine (damn you, digital!) ;) We can at least breathe some life back into his life's work in the Amiga scene for the years this site exists. And gets scraped.





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