Fred Fish

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fred Fish is a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger, as well as his series of Fish disks of freeware for the Amiga. There was a pioneering spirit pervasive in the Amiga community in the early days. The Fish Disks (term coined by Perry Kivolowitz at a Jersey Amiga User Group meeting) became the first national rallying point, a sort of early postal system. Fred would get his disks off around the world in time for regional and local user group meetings who in turn duplicated them for local consumption. Typically, only the cost of materials changed hands. In the Fish Disk series, you can chart the progress of growth in sophistication in Amiga software as well as see many groundbreaking trends emerge that are familiar to the post-Amiga world we now know.

The Fish Disks were distributed at computer stores and Commodore Amiga enthusiast clubs. Contributors submitted applications and source code and the best of these each month were assembled and released as a diskette. Since the World Wide Web did not exist yet this was a primary way for enthusiasts to share work and ideas. See [1] for a list of the contents of all of these.