Amnuts: 30 years old!

Today I have released a new version of the Amnuts Talker code. And to complete the new release, I’ve also added a new website (found at https://amnuts.net/).

This is a bit of a milestone for Amnuts; not just because it’s reached version 2.5.0, and not because the original PR was started about six years ago… But because I realised as I was prepping the latest code and docs that Amnuts was 30 years old this year!

I don’t know exactly when I started to distribute Amnuts, but it’s story actually starts in December 1995. Back then I had created a talker called Way Out West. It was pretty popular (if I do say so myself), and I had made a lot of additional updates to it from the original NUTS 3.3.3 code. Sooner or later I had people ask me for the code of additions I had made, or ask for advice on how they could do things in their own talkers. Because I got asked a lot of times, I decided to make my own stock talker that anyone could then take and make their own.

Amnuts was born.

Version v1.0.0 wasn’t distributed out to anyone. That was just for me to establish the code. Version v1.1.0/v1.2.0 were given to a small number of people to see what they thought. Apparently it was pretty favourable, because I went on to create v1.3.0 with a lot of additional changes and updates, and that’s the first version I considered as released.

And that was 30 years ago!

Time has flown, and the golden age of the talker has long passed (curse you, age of modern media, short attention spans, and whimsical memes!), but Amnuts is something that will always, always have a special place in my heart. It opened the door for me to meet many wonderful people (and I wish my memory was better so I could actually remember them all!), as well as being the whole reason I met the person that I’d marry just a few years after releasing the Amnuts talker code.

So thanks to all the people who visited Way Out West, who used Amnuts, who created their own talker, or just even still remember what talkers were! <3