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

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:06:03AM -0600, John Foust via cctalk wrote:
> At 03:13 PM 2/6/2019, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:
> >Lattice was the thing, back when I had Amiga. Too bad I could not
> >afford a harddisk :-).
> 
> As I related here back in 2005 and 2007:
> 
> I believe I stuck with Manx Aztec C throughout my entire era of Amiga 
> development.  I liked it because it was more Unix-like.  I got to know
> one of its developers, Jim Goodnow.
> 
> I was supposed to have an article in one of first issues of Amigaworld,
> reviewing the Lattice C compiler.
[...]
> it was canned and not published.

I guess you could have a revenge now and publish it on a web?

>  Development on a floppy-based Amiga was incredibly painful.

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             **