AmphetaDesk

» see disobey.com/amphetadesk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

AmphetaDesk was a web application before that phrase meant somebody else's computer. You installed it, it started a small server on your own machine, and it opened your browser at an address on localhost. Your subscriptions were files on your disk. The interface was HTML because HTML was already there, not because anything was being hosted for you.

Kevin Hemenway, who signed his work Morbus Iff, wrote the thing in Perl and published his reasons for it on the site. He had gone through My Yahoo, then a plugin-based collector called NewsClipper that rotted the way abandoned open source rots, then a clipping service called OnePage, then a beta of Radio UserLand's desktop aggregator. Radio was good. His complaint was that it was not software for his mother, and having recently learned enough Perl to be dangerous, he wrote the version that would be.

I came to reading on a schedule late, and through a browser tab rather than a program. In the window when AmphetaDesk was current I was a student in Ankara and the thing that updated was a forum: donanimhaber, frmtr, threads you refreshed by hand because that was the mechanism. Feeds reached me years after this, already server-side, already somebody else's account.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it did right ~

It ran everywhere that mattered in 2002, including the places nobody else bothered with: Mac OS 8 and 9, Mac OS X, Windows 98 and up, a separate build for Windows 95 that had to be maintained on its own, and source you could run on Linux. That list is a statement of who the software was for.

The templates and the internals were meant to be edited, and the documentation said so in as many words. It also shipped instructions for publishers who wanted a one-click subscribe link on their own page, which is a small idea with a long shadow: the subscribe button that hands a feed to whatever reader you happen to run started here and in a handful of contemporaries.

~ the cracks ~

The last general release, version 0.93.1, went out on 31 October 2002. A rebuilt Mac OS X 10.3 package followed on 5 January 2004 and that was the end of it. There was no announcement, because there rarely is when the project is one person and the person gets busy.

Bloglines had launched in 2003 and put the same idea on a server, which solved the problem AmphetaDesk structurally could not: your subscriptions stopped living on one machine. Once you could read the same list from a university lab and from home, a program installed on your own disk started to feel like a constraint rather than a feature.

~ the next chapter ~

Then Google Reader arrived, took the entire category, and shut down in 2013, and the people it stranded went looking for something they could run themselves. What they built was AmphetaDesk's shape again: a small server, your own machine, a browser pointed at it. Fever and Tiny Tiny RSS and everything since are that argument restated after a decade of centralization.

The site never came down. disobey.com is still Hemenway's, and the AmphetaDesk section under it still lists the 2002 downloads with the release dates next to them and a page of press quotes from a period when a free Perl aggregator was news. It is not a memorial. Nobody moved it. That is just where it stopped.

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