Fred Fish

Fred Fish (November 4, 1952 – April 20, 2007) was a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger and his series of Fish disks of freeware for the Amiga. He was a pioneering spirit pervasive in the Amiga community. 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.

Fred Fish
Fred Fish, Jason Compton, and Dave Haynie in 1995
Born(1952-11-04)November 4, 1952
DiedApril 20, 2007(2007-04-20) (aged 54)
Known forFish Disks
Image taken at the first Amiga show in Cologne (1989, Köln). Front row from left to right, Matt Dillon and Fred Fish

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 Internet was not yet in popular usage outside military and university circles, this was a primary way for enthusiasts to share work and ideas.[1] 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. in 1998.[2]

In 1978, he self-published User Survival Guide for TI-58/59 Master Library,[3] 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.[4]

gollark: You don't need to simulate things *exactly*, which helps.
gollark: So the universe's magic anti-paradox feature is forced to calculate it for you, or this generates some sort of really unlikely failure mode in your computing system.
gollark: 1. receive message from future containing the answer to your problem2. check it (this assumes it's one of the easy-to-check hard-to-answer ones)3. send it back
gollark: You can use informational time travel plus the fixed-timeline thing for hypercomputing, which is neat.
gollark: What I think a lot of settings do is have it so that you can transmit information to the past, but you can't edit history at all - what happened to cause the information to be sent, still happens. It's very confusing and can also be used for computation.

References
  1. Fish disks, Amiga Stuff.
  2. "Fred Fish". Archived from the original on December 24, 2008. Retrieved 2017-09-25.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link), Green Blog.
  3. Fish, Fred (1978). "User Survival Guide for TI-58/59 Master Library" (PDF). rskey.org. Retrieved 2018-06-19.
  4. Fred Fish will be missed, GNU gdb mailing list, 25 April 2007.
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