[HN Gopher] Fred Fish
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Fred Fish
Author : atan2
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-08-16 14:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| Taniwha wrote:
| 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
| daneel_w wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Damn it. Now I want to see this. Anyone have a spare time
| machine?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| 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.
| daggersandscars wrote:
| 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.
| tejtm wrote:
| 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.
| mgk123 wrote:
| amiga.physik.unizh.ch, wasn't that an A3000UX at one point???
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| boomskats wrote:
| Off topic, but it seems like South Park has made me selectively
| dyslexic.
| tomwojcik wrote:
| Wow, what a terrific audience!
| strangelove026 wrote:
| 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
| blooalien wrote:
| 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
| TheChaplain wrote:
| 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.
| atan2 wrote:
| My pleasure.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| 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).
| tjr wrote:
| 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!
| awful wrote:
| 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.
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| 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.
| krunck wrote:
| I remember the Fred Fish disk well. I always looked forward to
| getting a new one in the mail.
| khazhoux wrote:
| They were perfect morsels of source code goodness
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| More like Christmas!
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(page generated 2023-08-17 23:00 UTC)