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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: VnllaThndr on February 04, 2006, 05:35:24 PM
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This week, I bought about 1000 Amiga floppies off the 'bay. The listing was a bit unclear as to what the disks were, but the price was right, especially for 1000 floppies of who knows what.
Most of them are "Amiga FISH" disks. I guess these were openly distributed freeware disks. There are all kinds of utilities, demos and games on them. Has anyone else come across these disks or could point me in the direction of a guide to what's specifically on them? There's about 1000 of them, so inventorying them by hand will be a chore!
Are they useful?
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The first software I got for my A2000 was Dpaint 2. The second software I got was a Fred Fish disk with Moria on it. It was shareware, wonderful and I still play it. Fish Disks are wonderful shareware, freeware and demoware programs. For instance you got a C compiler with source code, two disks (76 & 77) were a programming language called Draco complete with examples and compiler etc! You got modem software, paint programs, games and so forth. I think there is an index here: http://www.funet.fi/pub/amiga/fish/
and from Wikipedia:
"Fred Fish is a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger, as well as his series of Fish disks of freeware for the Amiga. There was a pioneering spirit pervasive in the Amiga community in the early days. 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. Fred 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. In the Fish Disk series, you can chart the progress of growth in sophistication in Amiga software as well as see many groundbreaking trends emerge that are familiar to the post-Amiga world we now know."
I have numerous disks from the old Amiga store nearby and whenever I have to reformat a HD I invaribly end up digging out some Fish disks for games and such to fill in the spaces. Try going thru them and pick out a few that look interesting. A heck of a lot of those progs were useless to me as they are ports of text editors and other programming tools, but many of the games were early versions of commercial games. Have fun!
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Wow, awesome!
I've been crawling around looking for info and I must say, I got one hell of a deal!
Thanks for the assist, I'm quickly catching the Amiga bug.
(Sorry for the newb questions.)
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You can download the complete Fish disk collection from the net. I think I downloaded it from ftp.funet.fi
I have not found a use for them yet but it feels good to have them on a DVD.
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Then, why bother downloading?
I was just thinking, my DSL3M connection will download the files 14 (!) times faster than a DD floppy disk could supply - the times they are a-changin'...
OK, if you put the stuff on a DVD, that'll be way faster still. ;-)
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Hi,
Is there anywhere online where the complete collection of FISH disks can be downloaded as a single archive?
It seems a bit harsh to hammer the hell out of funet.fi to get all the files individually!
- Ali
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Yeah, that would be nicer... anyone know how big the entire set is?
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There was a CD collection available that went up to disk 1000. You might also look for the "Kingfisher" program which was a catalog & search engine for the Fish disks.
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Merc wrote:
Yeah, that would be nicer... anyone know how big the entire set is?
Yeah, about 45 lbs. ;)
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There were several CDs released. I have "Fresh Fish" which is a 2 CD set. There are more than 1000 "disks" all in all, but I can't find the darned thing to see just how many!
There used to be a lot of Star Trek stuff on these disks, but the studio that filmed the Star Trek series threatened to sue Fred, so most of those files were removed. They will still be on older collections however..... (Just another useless piece of info)