Fred Fish was my friend.
He was a gentle easy-going thoughtful person. An inspired engineer. And a tireless worker on behalf of the Amiga community.
A very short time after the first day an Amiga was available for sale (I drove from New Jersey to mid-Long Island to buy one on that day) Eric Lavitsky and I formed JAUG - the Jersey Amiga User Group. JAUG might have been FAUG but FAUG had had their first meeting a few days before our first meeting.
JAUG was a vibrant user group. We were quite large and brought in a good number of important guests. (FAUG, of course, was a legendary Woodstock love-in once a month - nobody could compete with FAUG)
A program I wrote which presented an animated 3D shaded Newton's Cradle appeared on Fred Fish's Freely Redistributable something or other disk number 1. The program is a very interesting thing to look up today as it was one of the two first hardcore (public) examples of using floating point on the Amiga. That's why I wrote it, by the way, and sent it out into the public domain. You couldn't just multiply two floats together in those days. You had to call a library and it wasn't easy. It presented cool graphics, but the actual contribution it made (I think) was demonstrating FP operations. The other "first" public example was also on disk 1.
Fred sent me a copy of the disk and I brought it to the next JAUG meeting.
We set up an A1000 with a number of external floppies and somebody manned the machine during the meeting and people who had brought their own floppy got a copy of the disk.
After this, a demo of the latest disk from Fred was a major highlight of every meeting. Fred Fish's Freely Redistributable something or other was a mouthful. To shorten it, I began referring to them as Fish Disks which became their (obvious) eventual common name. The first time I used this term however, I accidentally said Fish Dicks, not Disks. I think this might have helped the name become memorable.
Consider that this was so early, you couldn't buy Amiga compatible floppies easily. I used to buy them a case at a time and resell them one at a time at JAUG meetings as a service. Eventually we would come to JAUG meetings with hundreds of Fish Disks pre-copied which we would sell for the price of the floppy themselves.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of Fred to the Amiga. HE personally was the equivalent of the Internet today for Amiga users back then. He brought together examples from all over from people all over that taught all the other people from all over how to program the Amiga and what you could do with it. For a long time he did it himself and he did it for free.
That guy was so quiet and unassuming. Years later we would connect with each other at trade shows sometimes. Once he said to me that he was honored that I let him hang around with me. I looked at him and said, You're kidding right? I'm honored you let me hang around with you.
Fish Disk number 1 is a pretty interesting disk.
Let's take a look at some of the people on it. Admittedly I don't know everybody but here goes:
Charlie Heath (MicroSmiths) - Charlie and MicroSmiths became an important provider of Amiga software (and a fierce competitor of ASDG's CygnusEd).
Michael Mounier - I don't know Michael.
Me.
Robert Pariseau - Bob was the head of software at the original Amiga.
Rick Richardson - I don't know Rick.
Dale Luck - Duck needs no explanation.
Rick Ross - became an important provider of Amiga entertainment software.
John Draper (Aka "crunch") - wholly shit can I tell you stories about the Captain.
Louis Mamakos - really active and important developer.
Eric Lavitsky - a tireless champion of the Amiga from day 0 to the very end - developed the first Kermit I think.
Larry Hildenbrand - I don't know Larry - the other "first" FP example.
Rob Peck - Rob was the author of the Amiga manuals we all devoured.
David Lucas - I don't know David.
On disk 1 you have a range of Amiga possibilities shown. From Hello World in a window to 3D graphics animation, to paint, to imaging to computer speech. And the people on disk number 1 continued to be vibrant parts of the ecosystem for a long long time.
It was a fantastic start to a fantastic ride for Fred and for us all.
