The Commodore Amiga was a series of computers in production from 1985 until 1996. They brought 16-bit and later on 32-bit computers to the home, and with their leading graphics capabilities found their way into professional graphics and video studios too.
The Amiga had a vibrant user scene. This being before the Internet breakthrough around the turn of the century, software was exchanged mainly by disk. In the earliest days of the Amiga, local user groups would form and disks of free software would be swapped at group meets. Some of these groups would produce compilation disks, where they would pull together apps and tools, graphics and music, and anything else that their users had brought in to share, to make a "disk of the month", distributed to all their members.
Later, PD libraries would start up to act as a hub for freely-distributable Amiga software and media on disk. They would build a catalog of disks, and would duplicate and send out copies for a small fee. These became known as the best way to distribute free software. There were lots of libraries in vibrant competition with each other, many building a catalog covering thousands of disks. These libraries were very popular for much of the Amiga's existence. As the Amiga came to the end of its life in the mid-1990s, the PD libraries shut down and the remaining user community turned to the Internet for free software distribution.
The Amiga Freeware Archive is a historical archive of free software distributed by PD libraries and other pre-Internet sources. It aims to build a comprehensive, searchable and downloadable record of the PD library era. We are seeking what records remain of the PD libraries to re-build these catalogs of disks and software packages, and offer them for download in a curated, historically-accurate, and easy-to-use website. While the biggest PD libraries are well-recorded, many of the smaller, lesser-known libraries are much harder to discover - by finding and adding them to the archive, we hope to preserve them and make them visible for the long term.
To find out more about the archive, see the FAQ.