!Mr.Aminet Interviewed
by Ghandy/Darkage^Scenet
Urban "Mr. Aminet" Mueller In The Spotlights

done by Ghandy/Darkage^Scenet Staff

originally published in german language in the german commercial papermag AMIGAplus - http://amigaplus.de


Introduction

What is the most trustworthy files archive ever? Ftp.scene.org? Ftp.amigascne.org, ftp.trebel.org? No, none of them!! It`s since many, many years, still and with no doubt the good old Aminet. Nowadays the Aminet isn`t so hip in the Amiga demoscene anymore as people have to include a .readme file which takes a bit time to fill out.

And you know, people are lazy. Not to forget that they have to wait until the instructors have set free the new uploads after checking the contents for viruses, mistakes etc.

The Aminet does not only provide the biggest amount of oldskool files, also for the recent Amiga demoscene it offers a lot. Lately we had a chat with Mr. Urban "Aminet" Mueller, the grandpa of this great archive to elecit some more details.


Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
Hi Mr. Mueller, could you give us some statistics concerning the Aminet?


Urban Mueller:
A desert of numbers and statistics?? Nothing easier than this! Actually the Aminet consists of 67.400 archives that together fill a diskspace of 19.4gigs, without compression we would have around 40 gigabytes. To gain the statistics of the daily access, that`s harder as those informations would have been counted from all mirrors.

But what I can offer you is that around 15.000 archives are downloaded daily from our www portal and it`s similar when it comes to the ftp server.



Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
In the meantime you have wrecked the work from the PD-series compiler Fred Fish. Did he take that evil? What is he doing in these days, do you maybe still have any sort of contact?


Urban Mueller:
I`ve meet him at several occasions, once I also was at his home in Arizona. He is a real friendly person and for him the interest of the comsumer counts most, that`s the reason why I took in the complete Fred Fish disks into our archive, on the other side he also used us as a resource for some of the last Fish disks.

In my humble opinion the biggest problem of the Fish disks were their organisation, to spread them as disks didn`t fit anymore to the internet.




Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
No, people are searching for special programs and don`t want to be forced to download the rest of the disk that they`re not in need of.

To conduct the Aminet, such a person must be really idealistic, but was or is the sale of CD-Roms a possible financial base for you to live from? Or what is your job?


Urban Mueller:
There were times when it was my fulltime job, namely during the production of the CDs. For the first Aminet set I had to interrupt my studies for a semester. I don`t need a real job to afford life but sometimes I work in the internet business.

Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
What does exactly happen after a file was uploaded? How do you check it on viruses etc. Who`s doing that, a team of people or you alone? Have there ever been attempts to place the crack of a game or tool?



Urban Mueller:
First all files are transfered to the Amigas at our home. There we check the archive, the descriptions and if there are any viruses inside. And only then after passing , I or my co-moderator Matthias Scheler sort it in. Normally we allow anything with a decent description.

And yes, there was in fact an attempt to upload something illegal but that was the mistake of the uploader.

Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
Meanwhile there was a big harddisk-crash and the Aminet wasn`t available for quite some time, how did that happen?


Urban Mueller:
The 23gigs-HD of the mainsite in Paderborn/Germany was paid by us but we`re not sharing their diskspace as this would be too much. This harddisk had a bug and therefore we`ve send it back as we still had guarantee on it. Then it came back from the repair with the bug still remaining. We tried it again and then it worked.

Luckily we have now, after these miserable experiences, the opportunity to move quickly to somewhere else. The main site is now again located in the USA, after the defect of Paderborn also all our mirrows went online again.



Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
I`m sure you feel more save now! hehe. Do you count on a possible future of the Amiga? Will your archive remain whatever happens or will you then seek out for other computer platforms or operating systems like Linux, BeOS etc. to set something up with the same concept?

Urban Mueller:
Even if I would drop this project, I`m sure it would no problem to find others that would then continue my work. I`ve been thinking of building up something compareable, for example as I`m using Linux myself, but there do already exist good alternatives.

When I began, the reason to open the Aminet was simply because of my sickness about the other worse archives that existed at that time.

Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
What would you do in case of a power-failiture? Btw: What are your hobbies that doesn`t have anything to do with computers and such?



Urban Mueller:
I like to make sports, but only if it ain`t too much strenuous. That`s why I tend to jump out of good working airplanes or juggle here and there. But you can more often find me inside of a freefall simulator, that`s a vertical windchannel. Sadly it`s totally driven by electricity, no power, no artificial wind!



Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj:
Thanks for answering my questions!