Fred Fish

Image:Amiga koln.jpg|thumb|Image taken at the first Amiga show in Cologne. Front row from left to right, and. Back row from the left: and.
Fred Fish was a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger and his series of freeware disks for the Amiga.
Fish worked for Cygnus Solutions in the 1990s before leaving for Be Inc. in 1998.
In 1978, he self-published User Survival Guide for TI-58/59 Master Library. It was advertised in enthusiast newsletters covering the TI-59 programmable calculator. Fish also initiated the "GeekGadgets" project, a GNU standard environment for AmigaOS and BeOS.

Personal life

Fred Fish was married to Michelle Fish at the time of his death. He died of a heart attack at his home in Idaho on Friday, April 20, 2007.

The Amiga Library Disks

The Amiga Library Disks – colloquially referred to as Fish Disks – had a reach that included most all Amiga users in the world. Fish would distribute his disks around the world in time for regional and local user group meetings, which in turn duplicated them for local distribution. 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 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.