pouët.net

One thing that's always fascinated me about the Amiga scene are the utility disks (I'm sure they exist for other platforms as well). Pouët lists just a few (such as Cerberos' MegaWorkDisk), but on Kestra there's more than a thousand listed. Granted, some of the later ones are more like generic PD disks à la Fred Fish, but there must be hundreds of them specifically targeted at sceners.

I've always been intrigued by the varying styles and ingenuity in their presentation, with various hacks to set copper backgrounds, change the CLI look, custom made keymaps etc. Not to mention the ones with custom made menus complete with intro effects and music.

What strikes me as peculiar is the sheer number of extremely similar collections. A simple, low effort way to get a release with your name on it in circulation? Or pride in curating the very best tool selection? And how many of these disks could one person need, really? Was it important in some groups to stay "on brand" and use only officially sanctioned util disks?

Any util disk curators and users hanging around here are encouraged to step forward :)

Guess back in those days it was all about "getting up" and getting stuff out there as fast possible. You couldn't check what was already out...and probably couldn't know unless you were SuperDuper0-dayZ-WAREZswapper666. Impressive how productive and efficient packmakers and swappers were back in the day.

Sidenote, are there any "CLI CODING" demos/releases out there. I too remember some fancy things being done in CLI on these disks.

tFt, I sort of got to thinking about this after seeing Frustro with the little CLI surprise while loading.

Work disks are ossom!