Amiga, AtariST, soft repos [was: Re: Looking for: 68000 C compilers]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:06:03AM -0600, John Foust via cctalk wrote: [...] I guess you could have a revenge now and publish it on a web? tl;dr: Is there a software repository for AtariST comparable to Aminet? Yeah... It was a bit less painful if one had Amiga 2000 or higher (I had 2000c... or b?) since there was a lot of place inside. I had two floppy stations and second half of my ownership was blessed with ram extension (giving me total of 3 megabytes). I used Aztec C (it had proper linker (ln), make for makefiles and ar for *.a archive management, IIRC). Managed to squeeze full dev environment into ramdisk (I remember I had to delete some unused files to make place, and probably used some small AmigaDOS batch file to automate things). And the ramdisk was rebootable, and could be booted from, which was so cool (because Guru Meditation plagued me a bit)! On the other hand, later on I witnessed coming of relatively cheap PC-compatible harddrives for Amiga 500, which were unusable in my case (there were too few Amiga 2/3/4xxx users to care, and I believe around this time the inept C= managers decided to eject everything and /-I guess-/ pay themselves a bonus, so the ice under users' feet was definitely shrinking). I have also learnt to hate MS-made Basic (included on Workbench floppies) while trying to use it. Overally, it was a good experience. It helped me to grasp and appreciate modern aspects of computing, and so I swallowed the Unix bug in a second, while it took fellow students weeks or infinity (especially if they started with MS DOS, as I observed). OTOH, in retrospect, I wonder if I would spent the money wiser by choosing AtariST or going straight to 286 (not the same experience, I know, but cheap and easier to sell away). Or, if I wanted it really cheap, C128 was able to give me 80x24 terminal in one gfx mode, but I could not find any floppy drive for it capable of r/w PC floppies, so that option is probably out. I have a kind of very-very low priority project to investigate AtariST side of things, especially that nowadays I can run a very nice community-written TOS on emulator, but it seems there is no software repository similar to Aminet, am I right? I am interested in utility software, mostly compilers and editors and other such things. Multimedia and games, not so much. Actually, the project is spelled somewhat like "assume that buying Amiga 2000 was bad idea, was there something that could have prepared me for embracing Unix (and later, Linux), while giving me PC compatible floppy, good text terminal (i.e. 80x24) and maybe even hard drive? (gaming not required, as I really had almost no time for this)". So that John Titor could drop me a postcard (also, assume he is subscribed here). So far, one of AtariST or Amiga 500. But I cannot get price listings from old Polish computer press - my own papers lay buried deep below new papers, no access, and I am yet to find proper incantation for goog. So the "project" is on temporary hold. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **