Fred Fish

The "Fish Disk" nickname was coined by Perry Kivolowitz at a Jersey Amiga User Group meeting — the name stuck, and stuck hard. Fish's distribution method was elegantly simple: he would distribute his disks around the world in time for regional and local user group meetings, which in turn duplicated them for local distribution. It was a genuinely grassroots operation, held together by community goodwill and Fred's considerable personal effort.

What set the Fish Disks apart wasn't just scale, but editorial quality. Each release was assembled by hand, issued sequentially, and trusted implicitly by the Amiga community. Inclusion on a Fred Fish disk conferred legitimacy. Fish had a strong background in Unix and GNU software, and this shaped the collection's character from the very beginning — the second disk contained versions of make and MicroEmacs, the third had roff, and the fourth featured grep. Source code was frequently included alongside binaries, making the disks a learning resource as much as a software distribution channel. Contributors submitted applications and source code, and the best of these each month were assembled and released as a diskette.

In 1994, Fish Disk 1000 was released, the last compilation that was published as a disk. However, this wasn't the end: the Fish library continued on CD-ROM, and some of those CD-ROMs contained further disks. By the time of its ultimate end, the collection had grown to encompass 1,120 disks in total, numbered sequentially.

Fred Fish passed away on 20 April 2007. He left behind not just a remarkable archive, but a template for how software communities can organise and share freely — long before the open-source movement had a name, and long before the internet made it easy.