Fish Disks:
In the November 1985, shortly after the release of the Amiga 1000 and long before the internet, it was difficult for programmers and artists to distribute their work. It also was not easy to get hold of programs showing the fancy abilities of the upcoming Amiga platform. Software was mainly distributed by commercial sales and by a few bulletin board systems (BBS’s), which for many people required expensive long distance calls.
In this time Fred started a distribution system to work around these difficulties. The idea was that authors submit their freely distributable software, often incorrectly named public domain (PD) software in this time, together with the source code (later known as open source software) to Fred, who packaged the best submissions each month and released them on physical floppy disks, which were the primary storage medium in this time.
These non bootable Amiga OFS formatted disks were structured one sub directory per title, plus a common readme file listing contents, requirements, copyright status and whether the source code is included for each title. Most programs were directly startable from disk, provided the system was booted before. The disks were encouraged to be copied for free, allowing a symbolic small fee for media costs. The idea of PD disk series was born, and after some time nearly any Amiga user knew and exchanged the so called Fish Disks, also known as AmigaLib Disks.
On early disks, most software came with source code, but with time more and more programmers released their work as closed source. Fred always released his code open source, and never gave up on that. In the years 1985 to 1994 Fred released 1000 Fish Disks until the medium floppy disk lost its importance. Some user groups still wanted further disks, so starting with disk 1001 Amazing Computing (PIM Publications) compiled about 130 further disks from the CDs with Fred’s blessing and resubmitted the results.