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Fred Fish
- krunck 3y agoI remember the Fred Fish disk well. I always looked forward to getting a new one in the mail.
- runjake 3y agoSame. The pre-Internet dopamine hit from anticipating/getting a Fred Fish disk is tantamount to what I expect most people feel for social media.
- actionfromafar 3y agoMore like Christmas!
- khazhoux 3y agoThey were perfect morsels of source code goodness
- boomskats 3y agoOff topic, but it seems like South Park has made me selectively dyslexic.
- strangelove026 3y agoCame here to share the same. So funny that real life Kanye still doesn't get the joke (he's rapped about it 10 years later) (minor language warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw_GiE7ZcgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw_GiE7ZcgQ
- tomwojcik 3y agoWow, what a terrific audience!
- qingcharles 3y agoI think we all love Fish Disks.
- daggersandscars 3y agoThe article doesn’t mention it, but the Fred Fish disks were also made available via FTP on the early internet at least by 1991. I don’t know if this was official or unofficial. Handily, there was a utility that let Amigas read MS-DOS-formatted double-density (720K) disks without special hardware. Fond memories of going into campus computer labs and FTPing FF disks onto the lab PC and copying the files to disk. The process was error-prone. I’d take 10 disks in and end up with 7 - 9 my Amiga could read.
- tejtm 3y agoAminet! Recall it as the largest source of free software on the planet in its time. And it is still up! https://aminet.net/misc/fish https://aminet.net/misc/fish thanks for all the fish, truly formative experiences.
- mgk123 3y agoamiga.physik.unizh.ch, wasn't that an A3000UX at one point???
- acherion 3y agoFirst entry on their History page says it was: http://wiki.aminet.net/index.php/The_history_of_Aminet http://wiki.aminet.net/index.php/The_history_of_Aminet
- anthk 3y agoA fun thing it's that you can acces SSL sites with AmiSSL, and even Gemini clients (something like a device-independent Gopher with mandatory TLS) work.
- gumby 3y agoFred was a great guy to work with and a wonderful human being. We stopped and visited him on our honeymoon when he was still living in phoenix. How often do you want to visit people on your honeymoon? He had the remarkable ability to simultaneously eat breakfast cereal (bowl in one hand and spoon in the other) and write code or send email. I can’t explain it; he only had two hands.
- cbsmith 3y agoDamn it. Now I want to see this. Anyone have a spare time machine?
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoI know some people with truly incredible one-handed typing. I remember seeing a girl I knew from highschool in a coffee shop, one hand aggressively reading a book, the other hand hammering away on a keyboard. Turned out she had found a gig being paid to write people's homework essays, and was scanning for citations while typing out the essay. Remarkable stuff.
- cbsmith 3y agoPer the description, both hands were used for eating cereal.
- thsksbd 3y agoI also knew a girl who didnt know how two type with two hands, but was as fast as anyone with one hand. It was cool because she could use the mouse at the same time, or take notes on a piece of paper. Since then, Ive practiced one handed typing a bit and Im good enough at it for small tasks. Gets annoying with the modifier keys though.
- maxbond 3y ago> Gets annoying with the modifier keys though. My keyboard supports sticky modifiers, I tap them without holding and it modifies the next key. A double tap locks it until I press it a third time. I use a Keyboard.io Model 100 but I'm sure there are software solutions and/or cheaper keyboards that will do it too. (But shout-out to Keyboard.io, I have all 3 of their keyboards and love every single one like it's a cuold.)
- TheChaplain 3y agoIt's rare these days on the Internet but this submission made me actually smile with a warm nostalgic feeling of memories from the past. Thank you.
- atan2 3y agoMy pleasure.
- pmoriarty 3y agoFor someone who hadn't lived through that era to really understand how valuable a collection of shareware/freeware software on a disk was back then, you have to understand that it was an era of information scarcity. Nowadays you can easily get your hands on pretty much any software you want in a matter of seconds. Back then, before most people were on the internet, your options were: - buy it from the local computer store - buy it from an ad in a computer magazine - type it in from a program listing in a magazine or a book - log in to a bulletin board system (BBS) and download it through your modem - trade some software at a user's group (where you could maybe pick up some Fred Fish disks) BBS's actually had pretty good collections of software, but the software was scattered over many of them, and Amiga BBS's were relatively rare compared to the legions of PC-centered BBS's. Fred Fish provided the valuable service of collecting all that freeware for you, so you didn't have to hunt around for it yourself -- all you had to do was get ahold of his disks (of which there were literally hundreds).
- tjr 3y agoWe had a local Amiga user group, and they had many (most? all?) of the Fred Fish disks on floppy disk, a big box of them, and would make you a copy for a small fee. I remember being so excited to get a CD-ROM drive and the "Frozen Fish" archive CD!
- User23 3y agoYeah CD-ROM was a game changer. I remember what a big deal the EduCorp CDs were in the Mac world.
- awful 3y agoOr even -rent- software from another state, even; place your order then a week or two later, it would show up. You had to then repackage and resend.
- acherion 3y agoA lot of shareware was also distributed on coverdisks for computer magazines. Not sure if this was a thing in North America, but in Europe and Australia, coverdisks were very popular.
- daneel_w 3y agoExploring the Fish Disks was an adventure when I was growing up with the Amiga in the early 90s. An endless amount of curious, useful, useless, great, poor, fun and boring applications, utilities and games.
- flopsamjetsam 3y agoI used and loved these, but never knew Fred Fish was actually his name. I mustn't have been paying attention :) Looking through the Wikipedia page brought back some memories, seeing the names Dave Haynie and Matt Dillon.
- blooalien 3y agoIn a sorta remotely similar(ish) vein, on early Apple machines, we had Beagle Bros [0] (among others). Man, I miss "the good ol' days" when technology was still full of wonder and magic. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros
- Taniwha 3y agoI worked with Fred in the late 80s (he was our tools/compiler guy, we ported Unix onto new hardware) he was a great guy to work with
- stooart 3y agoI met a couple of people who knew him - he was a genuinely much loved man. I collected a few Fish disks over the years that opened up a broad world of computing to me, long before I had internet access. Raytracing, C programming, 3D graphics, database - just so many toys!
- choppsv1 3y agoI remember how proud I was as a new, young programmer, to have something I created get added to the fish disks (ProjMot disk #453) :)
- khazhoux 3y agoLet's go deeper... Who remembers their favorite programs (source or binary), and (for bonus points) has a link? Disks can be found at: https://philreichert.org/book/fred-fish/listing-01.html http://aminet.net/misc/fish
- anselm 3y agoI used to really love getting each new floppy when they were released and it was a big deal at our amiga club. My own contribution made it onto disk 14 for a 4d to 2d tesseract renderer but a second submission was pulled for violating a copyright for Tetris.
- amiga386 3y agoI'm a few years late in appreciating the Fish disks, but what was the absolute bees knees for me was Geek Gadgets - effectively a mini free software distro for AmigaOS. Developed and maintained by lots of people but spearheaded by Fred. Finally, I could actually run gcc and perl and so much more on my Amiga. Thanks, Fred!
- jmoak3 3y agoAny relation in the name of this early children's computer game? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddi_Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddi_Fish