What was the first (largest) Amiga Download site?

[markpjd]

Hi,

I remember Lazarus.. I remember it being slow? and then shut down!

[Retro-Nerd]

I remember pe2000.net. Closed in 2002/2003.

[mark_k]

ab20.larc.nasa.gov maybe? The first Aminet CD-ROM has a snapshot of that.

[happymondays]

Lazarus was active in 1997, I clearly remember, but when did it start?

[Belgarath]

Lazarus was probably the largest for it's time.

[zipper]

Long time (92 and on ) site for old Amiga stuff http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/amiga/
(and all kinds of other stuff, too)

[prowler]

TOGA

[vulture]

plukwa ftp

[DamienD]

PlanetEmu and EmuChina (though both had arcade / other computers / consoles also so not strictly Amiga).

[markpjd]

Originally Posted by prowler

TOGA

Good old fashioned 90's website design. To the point, easy to use and not a million and one ad's trying to load at the same time - crashing the browser.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by zipper

Long time (92 and on ) site for old Amiga stuff http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/amiga/
(and all kinds of other stuff, too)

I do remember back in college I used to download from a site that ended in .fi.
That was probably it.. funet.fi sounds familiar.. (for some reason tut.fi sounds familiar too, but it's been years.....)

desiv

[zipper]

Yep, university servers.

[Lucidphreak]

A bbs in dallas that I used to be on... Some major courier group.. I almost want to say razor but I dont think they were amiga - but it was someone of equal size..

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by prowler

TOGA

But no Disk of the Month for a while now....

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Anubis

But no Disk of the Month for a while now....

Maybe, but the thread title is "What was the first (largest) Amiga Download site?"

[Mark Wright]

Originally Posted by Belgarath

Lazarus was probably the largest for it's time.

OFF-TOPIC ALERT: Just a bit of history about LAZARUS while I'm in a reminiscing mood. For those who don't care, you can skip this reply ;-)

When we launched LAZARUS in July of 1997 (almost nineteen years ago!) we made a deliberate, conscious decision to aim the site at users of Amiga emulators on other platforms, rather than current owners of Amiga hardware. This was purely a reflection of my own circumstances, having been an Amiga user from 1988-1996, suddenly struck by a bout of nostalgia thanks to the emergence of UAE/WinUAE/DOSUAE/Fellow, etc.

It was never intended for LAZARUS to become the notorious, infamous, unwieldy behemoth that took over my life for eighteen memorable months; we merely wanted to collect a load of old, long presumed-dead Amiga stuff before it was lost forever, in order to share it with everyone else. WoS was already doing it for the ZX Spectrum, while C64 fans had Arnold. With the internet still in its infancy back then, we wondered whether there'd be any real interest. Little did we know just how many hundreds of thousands of Amiga fans would flock to the site in order to help, heckle and hinder our efforts.

LAZARUS only happened thanks to a miracle combination of perfect timing, chance meetings and pure luck. The three of us had a lot of time on our hands back then, each with the requisite and complementary skills necessary to get the thing started. The site was hosted by a start-up ISP operated by an Amiga fan, so we were able to dodge the usual "cease and desist" flack that was common at the time, with more serious communication sent directly for us to deal with while the site remained up. We felt untouchable. For a while at least.

The initial support for LAZARUS was phenomenal, as word started to spread, leading to astonishing traffic. Bearing in mind our goal was simply to gather together all of those ancient but important Amiga touchstones for all to access, within weeks we had become the number one bandwidth-busting definitive destination for anyone wishing to feed their Amiga emulator. Such was the ready supply of freshly-prepared adfs, submitted around-the-clock by our dedicated team of archivists, exclusively for LAZARUS, our ever-swelling downloads sections became an addiction for many. Too many as it would turn out.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, LAZARUS eventually bowed out in January 1999. Its legacy? Many of the files in your Amiga TOSEC installation originated as uploads to LAZARUS. Of course, if we hadn't have been around to organise it, someone else would have eventually staged a similar effort - indeed, by the time LAZARUS breathed its last, we were just one Amiga emulation site amongst many others. Was LAZARUS pioneering? We had no particular expectations when we launched the site nineteen years ago. We just hoped it would be "popular" and would yield the ancient lost Amiga software we sought.

On its death, the LAZARUS ceremonial torch was officially passed to our friend Bobic at Back To The Roots. He shared our vision and LAZARUS was his inspiration. We warned him to expect hate mail and death threats from current Amiga owners, who would enevitably brand his project (like ours) as a "warez site". We handed over our (private) database of sanctions and agreements from enthusiastic, well-known authors and publishers for downloads, so he could continue our (private) mission of seeking and gaining permissions.

But anyway. It was only a website. Big deal. Nevertheless, it's clearly regarded with fondness by some. One day, I'll get around to finishing this Amiga Power-inspired retrospective (copy incorrect in various places):

http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/laz2.pdf
http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/laz1.pdf

[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.

[kingpin007]

Originally Posted by Lucidphreak

A bbs in dallas that I used to be on... Some major courier group.. I almost want to say razor but I dont think they were amiga - but it was someone of equal size..

The Castle bbs was Razor 1911 first BBS, located in Texas and open since september 1989... it was amiga and pc

[markpjd]

Thanks for the insight, Mark. I enjoyed reading about the history of the site.

Myself and my friend James at the time interacted with Martijn at WoS quite regularly trying to locate companies and individuals regarding licences for games.

Copyright is a mine field though. Even to this day, a lot companies want to protect their old titles, or they have been lost among the continuous run of acquisitions in to one or more companies.

[Antiriad]

Oh I remember leaching off Lazarus during college in Brighton... Anyway, the Dream Zone was another big resource, even if less well known