Aminet | Code Like It's 198x

In October 1995 Amiga Format tracked down the man behind Aminet and asked him how it had started. “You wouldn’t believe how puny it was in the beginning,” said Urban Müller, spelled Mueller in the English-language magazines. In January 1992 Aminet was one Amiga 3000 running Unix, donated by Commodore Switzerland, with 50 megabytes of disk space. Four years later it held more than 30,000 files, and the Amiga magazines reported that it had overtaken every other FTP archive on the internet, whatever the platform. It never closed. In September 2026 its front page listed 85,614 packages, and new ones were still arriving every few days.

A student’s FTP site

Aminet grew out of a small archive that a student club ran on the donated Amiga. Müller took it over in January 1992, CU Amiga reported, and wrote the programs that handled the short .readme file that accompanies every upload, still the archive’s trademark. In January 1994 AmigaWorld told its American readers that “the hottest FTP site is in Switzerland”, at the address amiga.physik.unizh.ch, run by Urban Mueller, “author of the popular programming utility CShell”.

Müller told Amiga Format that he had two aims. One was simply to run the FTP site. The other was to bring together Amiga software that was scattered across “at least a dozen Amiga sites, each with its own, unique collection. Finding stuff and checking for new releases was a pain.” Soon after he took over, the biggest of those sites closed, and Aminet was “totally overrun by tons of people trying to access the archive all at the same time”. Friends who ran computers elsewhere agreed to keep copies, and he wrote the scripts that kept those mirrors up to date.

Space ran out next: at first the archive could keep files for only a few weeks. A donation drive among its users raised enough for a 1.8-gigabyte drive within a week, and half of the money came from the CD-ROM publisher Walnut Creek. Then the university decided that Aminet’s traffic was too much and asked it to leave. It found a new home on wuarchive.wustl.edu at Washington University in St. Louis, and Müller went on running it as a telecommuter.

How it worked

Everything went into one tree of directories named by subject and then by type, such as comm/term for terminal programs, dev/c for C compilers, game/shoot for shoot-’em-ups, docs/mags for disk magazines and util/libs for libraries. Each archive came with its .readme, and Müller wrote the software that mirrored the archive and generated its indexes. Asked for his all-time greats in 1995, Müller named a terminal program, a C compiler, a Mac emulator and the MUI interface library, and said they all “rival or surpass their commercial equivalents”.

By then the backbone was a set of about 30 Unix computers on the internet that picked up new files several times a day. “Many BBSs, mostly in Germany, offer Aminet files as well,” Müller said, and counting their operators, about 200 people helped keep the copies correct. The archive held 3,300 megabytes of compressed files in 20,000 archives, “equivalent to about 7,000 floppy disks”. The main site had up to 1,000 users a day, and he guessed 10,000 a day worldwide. More than 1,000 new archives were arriving every month.

Much of that was music. In November 1995 Amiga Computing wrote that “there are a vast number of mods, as the tunes are called, available from public domain sources like the Aminet”. Aminet’s mods directory held the modules made with SoundTracker, ProTracker and their successors.

Müller did not think people should expect to earn a living from what they uploaded. “If you want to write Shareware for the money: forget it,” he told Amiga Format. “There are at most half a dozen Shareware programs on the Amiga that have paid their programmers a real salary.” He was sure the free software mattered, though: “For no other system, PC and Mac included, is there such a huge collection of FD software.”

The Aminet CDs

CD-ROM brought Aminet to Amiga owners who had no internet connection. Walnut Creek CDROM of Concord, California, announced an Aminet CD in Amazing Computing in October 1993, with “thousands of Amiga programs from the Aminet Internet Archive”. Amiga Format reviewed it in March 1994 at £19.99, holding the archive’s contents up to July 1993, and called it the most wide-ranging of the CDs on its pages.

Walnut Creek published the first two discs. From the third, dated July 1994, Müller arranged the discs himself, and they were published by Stefan Ossowski’s Schatztruhe in Germany and the distributor GTI. The Italian Amiga Magazine explained the pricing in January 1995. The disc came in two boxes with the same contents: for each copy of the “Gold” version sold, GTI passed 3 marks to Müller to buy hard disks for the growing archive, while buyers of the “Share” version were asked to send him 10 marks themselves. The disc added AmigaGuide indexes, with a button beside each program to read its description or unpack it.

The discs became a regular series. In 1995 Müller said a user survey had chosen a new CD every two months over a quarterly one, with at least 500 megabytes of new files on each and room for as much again from other sources: Aminet CD 7 carried almost 10,000 clip-art images. He also tried to rate every mod, game and demo on each disc, “or the users have to try them all”. The multi-disc Aminet Set collections gathered the whole archive: Aminet Set 1, on sale in early 1995, was four CDs holding close to 4 gigabytes, with the Fred Fish disks included. The numbered series ran past Aminet 44 in 2001, and a limited Aminet 50 was on sale in 2003.

The biggest archive

Amiga Shopper marked 16 May 1996 as the day Aminet “became the biggest in the world”. With more than 30,000 files it passed the next two largest archives, the PC collection SimTel and the Macintosh collection Info-Mac, according to c|net’s Virtual Software Library. At 5,052 megabytes, only one archive on the internet was larger by size, and that one held OS/2 software. CU Amiga reported the same record, and counted more than 30 mirrors and five gigabytes of Amiga files.

The load told on the machines. In October 1997 CU Amiga reported outages because wuarchive had filled its 70-gigabyte disk array, which was being upgraded to 115 gigabytes. In May 1999 Amazing Computing reported that after “one too many crashes” Müller had moved the main archive to a server in Germany, with the Washington University site carrying on as a mirror.

After the Amiga years

Aminet outlasted the magazines that reported on it. According to public reference works, the main mirror lost its hard disk in 2004, and a volunteer team, including Christoph Gutjahr and Nicolas Mendoza, brought the archive back under the name aminet.net in February 2005. The site still credits “Urban Müller and the Aminet team”. Its front page lists new uploads for the Amiga every few days, and on 25 September 2026 it counted 85,614 packages.

Sources

Amiga Format issue 76, October 1995: “Aminet”, interview with Urban Mueller (the A3000UX, the aims, the mirrors, the donation drive, Walnut Creek, the move to Washington University, the size and use of the archive, his favourite files, shareware, the CD schedule and ratings).
AmigaWorld vol. 10 no. 1, January 1994, p. 67: internet feature (amiga.physik.unizh.ch, run by Urban Mueller, author of CShell).
Amazing Computing vol. 8 no. 10, October 1993, p. 8: new products, the Aminet CDROM from Walnut Creek CDROM.
Amiga Format issue 57, March 1994: CD-ROM reviews, the Aminet CD (Walnut Creek, £19.99, contents to July 1993).
Amiga Magazine (Italy) no. 63, January 1995, p. 66: review of Aminet CD 3 (July 1994), in Italian (Walnut Creek’s first two discs; Mueller, Stefan Ossowski and GTI; the Gold and Share versions).
Amazing Computing vol. 10 no. 5, May 1995: news of Aminet Set 1 (four CDs, Fred Fish disks, close to 4GB).
Amiga Computing issue 92, November 1995: music software feature (mods from “public domain sources like the Aminet”).
Amiga Shopper issue 65, August 1996, p. 12: news, Aminet the biggest archive, 16 May 1996.
CU Amiga, August 1996: news, “The biggest and the best” (the student club, the .readme files, 30,000 files, more than 30 mirrors).
CU Amiga, October 1997: news, outages at wuarchive.
Amazing Computing vol. 14 no. 5, May 1999, p. 26: “Aminet Home Moves”.
Bitplane (Italy) issue 0, October 2001: Aminet 44 and Aminet Set 11. Total Amiga issue 14, spring 2003: Aminet 50.
Wikipedia, “Aminet” (web, secondary): the 2004 disk failure, the recovery team and the February 2005 relaunch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aminet
Aminet, front page, viewed 25 September 2026 (web, secondary): package count, recent uploads, credit to Urban Müller and the Aminet team. https://aminet.net/