Fred Fish (November 4, 1952 – April 20, 2007) was a computer programmer notable for work on the

GNU Debugger The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran, Go, and partially others. History GDB was first written ...

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 Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

. The Fish Disks (term coined by

Perry Kivolowitz Perry Kivolowitz (born 1961) is an American computer scientist and business person. In 1985, he co-founded Advanced Systems Design Group which built hardware for the Commodore Amiga. This company was renamed Elastic Reality, Inc. and became well ...

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 comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

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 AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

and BeOS. Fish worked for

Cygnus Solutions Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: ''Making free software affordable''. For years, employ ...

in the 1990s before he left for Be Inc. 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 The TI-59 is an early programmable calculator, that was manufactured by Texas Instruments from 1977. It is the successor to the TI SR-52, quadrupling the number of "program steps" of storage, and adding "ROM Program Modules" (an insertable ROM ...

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 A myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when blood flow decreases or stops to the coronary artery of the heart, causing damage to the heart muscle. The most common symptom is chest pain or discomfort which may tr ...

.''Fred Fish will be missed''
GNU gdb mailing list, 25 April 2007.

References

External links

Searchable database of Fish disk Amiga

PD software Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, ...

Fish Disks
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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