Fred Fish (November 4, 1952 – April 20, 2007) was a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger and his series of

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

Fish disks for the Amiga. 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. Fish 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. The Fish Disk series ran from 1986 to 1994. In it, one can chart the growing sophistication of Amiga software and see the emergence of many software trends. The Fish Disks were distributed at computer stores and Amiga enthusiast clubs. Contributors submitted applications and

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

and the best of these each month were assembled and released as a diskette. Since the Internet was not yet in popular usage outside military and university circles, this was a primary way for enthusiasts to share work and ideas. Fish
disks, Amiga Stuff. He also initiated the "GeekGadgets" project, a GNU standard environment for AmigaOS and BeOS. Fish worked for Cygnus Solutions in the 1990s before he left for

Be Inc. Be Inc. was an American computer company founded in 1990. It is best known for the development and release of BeOS, and the BeBox personal computer. Be was founded by former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée with capital from Seymour Cra ...

in 1998., Green Blog. In 1978, he self-published ''User Survival Guide for TI-58/59 Master Library'', which was advertised in enthusiast newsletters covering the TI-59 programmable calculator.

Personal life

Fred Fish was married to Michelle Fish (née Norman) at the time of his death. Fred Fish died at his home in Idaho on Friday April 20, 2007 of a heart attack.''Fred Fish will be missed''
GNU gdb mailing list, 25 April 2007.

References

External links

Searchable database of Fish disk Amiga
PD software
Fish Disks
*
Announcement of first Fish disks
* * - research in progress, explicitly welcomes Wiki usage. {{DEFAULTSORT:Fish, Fred Computer programmers Amiga people 1952 births 2007 deaths Place of birth missing