Fred Fish | Hacker News Reader

Fred Fish

en.wikipedia.org

169 pointsatan244 comments

For 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).

We 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!

Yeah CD-ROM was a game changer. I remember what a big deal the EduCorp CDs were in the Mac world.

I don't remember the name of the MSDOS shareware vendor, but they had a monthly catalogue which was sent out by post.

Each item had a pretty good description and I'd spent hours reading through the catalogue trying to visualise what the software would do.

Then I'd fill in the order form, post it back with payment and wait a week or so for the floppies to arrive. That did not seem slow to me - it was my normal.

I remember the excitement of installing the software and learning via the README.TXT files.

I had a similar experience as a kid. I remember ordering a couple of disks from a catalogue that listed program sizes and trying to pack as many games into those floppies as possible.

Do read me texts still exist? I loved that tradition, but can't recall seeing one in commercial software in recent years.

A 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.

Circa '89 here in the UK there was a 400+ page book of shareware you could get by filling out a form in most magazines, the book then listed shareware by what it did and encouraged you to order a copy (for a modest fee to cover disk and postage fee) from them, with each order you'd receive the most recent copy of the book as well.

Most of the time I just used the book as a guide to what I could extract via bitftp email from ftp.funet.fi, but the book came in handy during holidays when I had no internet access.

Part of it was even learning what you should be looking for - so the listings of software titles alone were valuable, as then at least you might know the question to ask.

> Nowadays you can easily get your hands on pretty much any software you want in a matter of seconds.

...Kind of; there's plenty of choice, but a lot of them are padded with marketing and come with e.g. a subscription or things like that. Besides that there's often a lot of choices to be made, whereas back then utilities like a text editor were so new that you didn't even know there was a choice.

Or 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.

For me dialup wasn't an option to get fish disks. Nearest BBS were in the city, so it was a long distance call ($$$), and I'd have to stick to 1200 bps because of the line noise. Downloading a full 880k disk would have tied up the phone at long distance rates for hours and hours.

But there were a couple of shops in the city that did Amiga stuff and some of them could get you fish disks, so I got a lot of my Amiga stuff from fish disks.

Things like Az text editor, many small games. Med and Octamed! So much cool stuff. Getting box of 10 fish disks was like opening Christmas presents.

For what its worth, my favourite fish disk (well, the one I still remember individually with great fondness) was #162, and I'll post the contents below as its a great example of them in general. Many hours I spend playing LabyrinthII - a text adventure style single player battle royale game - with the "Unknown Girl" track playing in another window on my Amiga 2000 with its fully multitasking operating system...

CONTENTS OF DISK 162 ====================

Avi A workalike version of the UNIX vi editor for the amiga. Though not especially recommended for beginners, designed for those of you who may have the vi commands permanently hard-coded into your fingertips! Version 1.0, binary only. Author: Peter Nestor

CLI_Utilities This directory contains several subdirectories with small utilities, collected from various sources, that are only usable from the CLI. See the Readme file for further information. Some include source. Author: Various

Dark A small graphics and animation demo. Includes source. Author: Phil Robertson

Flow2Troff A little utility to convert from New Horizons Software "FLOW" files to UNIX "troff" files, suitable for printing on any troff-compatible laser printer. Version 1.0, includes source and a sample "FLOW" file. Author: Daniel Barrett

LabyrinthII A shareware role-playing text adventure game similar in operation to the Infocom text adventures. Includes source. Author: Russell Wallace

Iffar Maintains archives of Interchange File Format (IFF) FORM, CAT and LIST files in a manner that complies with the IFF CAT specification. Version 1.2, includes source. Author: Karl Lehenbauer

SetPALorNTSC A couple of utility programs for testing the suitability of a developed program in either the PAL or NTSC environments. Includes source and a sample program. Author: Peter Kittel

TES "The Electronic Slave" adds a gadget strip to the top of the cli window to perform such functions as device directories, info, run ED, and time. Currently, assignments are hardcoded but not difficult to change if you own a compiler. Version 1.1, includes source. Author: Joerg Anslik

UnknownGirl Another small musical piece similar in execution to "Synthemania" on disk number 153. Binary only. Author: Holger Lubitz

Source for listing: https://web.archive.org/web/20230629192847/http://www.amiga-...

Fred 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.

Damn it. Now I want to see this. Anyone have a spare time machine?

I 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.

Per the description, both hands were used for eating cereal.

I 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.

> 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.)

I can type with one hand faster than a lot of people can do with two - ~50WPM (right) and ~45WPM (left) if I don't need to use the modifier keys; "home position" is FGHJ, thumb on spacebar, and from there it's just a matter of memorising where all the other keys are. Quite a useful skill if you need to often operate applications that rely on both mouse and keyboard input.

The 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.

Aminet!

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

thanks for all the fish, truly formative experiences.

A 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.

amiga.physik.unizh.ch, wasn't that an A3000UX at one point???

First entry on their History page says it was: http://wiki.aminet.net/index.php/The_history_of_Aminet

It'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.

My pleasure.

Off topic, but it seems like South Park has made me selectively dyslexic.

Came 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

I think we all love Fish Disks.

Wow, what a terrific audience!

I remember the Fred Fish disk well. I always looked forward to getting a new one in the mail.

Same.

The pre-Internet dopamine hit from anticipating/getting a Fred Fish disk is tantamount to what I expect most people feel for social media.

More like Christmas!

They were perfect morsels of source code goodness

I 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

I 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.

Exploring 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.

I 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!

I remember how proud I was as a new, young programmer, to have something I created get added to the fish disks (ProjMot disk #453) :)

I'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!

In 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

Let'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

I 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.

Any relation in the name of this early children's computer game?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddi_Fish

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