What was the first (largest) Amiga Download site?

[Belgarath]

Wow I totally forgot about the Dream Zone..good job there's still enough of us oldtimers around to remind the others about stuff we've forgotten

[Mark Wright]

Originally Posted by B14ck W01f

I believe that Lazarus was the first Amiga download site, and I only got a couple of games there. It was later busted by the tossers at Gateway 2000 for carrying copyrighted Kickstart ROMs, and the IDSA decided to finish them off.

As I mentioned previously, there was always lots going on behind the scenes at LAZARUS that couldn't be made public at the time, causing much gnashing of teeth internally, while we suffered the constant volley of slings and arrows. We were operating in an era when similar sites were suddenly shut down on a daily basis, while LAZARUS enjoyed its priveleged and exalted position of being hosted by a start-up ISP who was 100% on our side. We were able to ride out the storm of cease-and-desist/takedown actions that slowly obliterated our friends who weren't so lucky. Thinking back - god, weren't we lucky? Our ISP deliberately ignored, or passed on to us directly, any attempts to have us taken offline. Kudos to Khaled of Aqcom New York - LAZARUS' secret weapon!

Quick aside: LAZARUS was by no means the first Amiga download site (presuming the OP is referring to websites serving users of UAE with ADF files), someone called "Warlock" had already archived and uploaded hundreds of files to his website long before I even had a PC running DOS UAE. LAZARUS itself was a merger between various other sites (Trev's Guru Meditation being the only one I can remember at the moment) dating from late 1996. Most of us were still refreshing Aminet's "today's uploads" page on a regular basis back then, hoping for something of interest.

But anyway.

The untold story of LAZARUS' demise (for anyone remotely interested after all these years) is particularly sad for me, but not for the reasons that everyone assumed. LAZARUS was never "busted" or forced offline due to anything litigious. I've already spoken about its unique position of having control over its own destiny due to our ISP; we never succumbed to any legal threats - in fact, we wrote about such things at length on the website itself for the benefit of others, see the links below.

At our peak, we were giving away copies of the original Amiga Forever in a competition (supplied by Michael Battilana at Cloanto); we were helping to source original materials for Julian Eggebrecht in an effort to secure Factor 5 IP; we'd made firm friends with the ex-editor of one of the greatest Amiga magazines ever to grace the newsstands (whose bombastic style we'd brazenly copied) alongside his Caledonian cohort, the scourge of the trade press and former consultant to a poppy-related software developer at which he'd, "never had so much fun". I was inundated by emails from former Amiga programmers and developers who recognised the novelty of what we were doing and were glad to swing-by and pick-up something they thought they'd lost forever.

LAZARUS only died because I let it. Plain and simple. By the end of 1998 I was running off CD-ROMs of its archive for punters, on a 1x speed (real-time!) SCSI CD writer, in order to pay the several-thousand pound UK dial-up phone bills I'd racked up in order to maintain the website. Although I loved the adoration from Amiga fans (famous or otherwise), I felt we'd fought and won enough battles so that, thanks to visitors to LAZARUS, the internet was now awash with classic Amiga fare. Was there anything more for me to contribute? By then, there were other sites. As mentioned in my last post, the official LAZARUS torch was handed over to Bobic at Back To The Roots.

Our ISP held out until the bitter end, dedicated to the last. LAZARUS officially died the day he sent me an email: "I've had another threat from the IDSA, do you want me to bounce it or do you want to reply?" He forwarded it on, I read it... and decided I'd had enough. There was nothing special about this notice; it was just like the 500 or so we'd had before - their auto-bot had "matched" content on our site with IP they claimed to protect. Many sites had crumbled in the face of only one such email. For whatever reason, this time, I decided to lay LAZARUS' Kevlar body armour to rest and close the site.

Anyone still reading will surely agree that, all of the above, is my particular trade-mark way of saying that this:

Originally Posted by B14ck W01f

I believe that Lazarus was the first Amiga download site, and I only got a couple of games there. It was later busted by the tossers at Gateway 2000 for carrying copyrighted Kickstart ROMs, and the IDSA decided to finish them off.

..is not true.

Oh.. those links about our battles (at least, the ones we could make public)..

http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/lazar...editorial.html
http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/lazar...editorial.html
(Mr Bongo referenced in the above is... [remove curtain] Stuart Campbell)
http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/lazar...editorial.html

I have other files knocking around elsewhere for the 0.00001% of you interested. It seems so archaic now that there was such a fuss back then. I once (successfully) defended LAZARUS as coming long after the advent of PD libraries advertising their CD-ROMs of Spectrum/C64 games on the back page of glossy Amiga and PC magazines. The plaintiff backed down. I've only just remembered that LAZARUS *almost* won complete freedom of Kickstart 1.3 based on its appearance on the cover of CU Amiga magazine as a part of Relokick, thus rendering it by implication effectively public domain. And we'd have won too, had our files not been stored on a US-based server. You can thank Gateway 2000's lawyer for that one.