Fish Disk #0001 © 1986 Fish, Fred.
CONTENTS:
amigademo: Graphical benchmark for comparing amigas.
amigaterm: Terminal emulation program with xmodem upload/download capability.
balls: Simulation of the "kinetic thingy" with balls on strings where only the end balls move.
colorful: Shows off use of hold-and-modify mode.
dhrystone: Dhrystone benchmark program.
dotty: Source to the "dotty window" demo on the Workbench disk.
freedraw: A small "paint" type program. Free drawing, boxes, filled boxes, etc.
gad: "Fun with Gadgets". Demonstration program for use of gadgets.
gfxmem: Graphical memory usage display program. Watch your machine's memory usage! Cute and useful.
halfbrite: Sample program that demonstrates "Extra-Half-Brite" mode on latter AMIGA's with new VLSI chip. Allows 64 colors in low-res mode, rather than 32.
hello: Demonstrates creation of a simple window, "hello world".
latffp: Shows how to access the Motorola Fast Floating Point library from Lattice C. Also demonstrates the tremendous speedup obtained.
palette: Sample program for designing color palettes.
trackdisk: Demonstrates use of the trackdisk driver. Useful example of "raw" disk read/write.
requesters: Sample program and documentation for building and using requesters.
speech: Sample speech demo program. Stripped down version of "speechtoy".
speechtoy: Another speech demo program. You have to see this one. Be sure to click gadget that pops up the face.
The Fish Disks became the first national rallying point, a sort of early postal system. Fish 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. The Fish Disk series ran from 1986 to 1994. In it, one can chart the growing sophistication of Amiga software and see the emergence of many software trends.
The Fish Disks were distributed at computer stores and Commodore Amiga enthusiast clubs. Contributors submitted applications and source code and the best of these each month were assembled and released as a diskette. Since the Internet was not yet in popular usage outside military and university circles, this was a primary way for enthusiasts to share work and ideas.
The term 'Fish Disks' was coined by Perry Kivolowitz at a Jersey Amiga User Group meeting.
amigademo: Charlie Heath (MicroSmiths)
amigaterm: Michael Mounier
balls: Perry Kivolowitz
colorful: Robert Pariseau
dhrystone: Reinhold Weicker (Ada version), Rick Richardson (C version)
dotty: Dale Luck
freedraw: Rick Ross
gad: John Draper (crunch)
gfxmem: Louis Mamakos
halfbrite: Robert Pariseau
hello: Eric Lavitsky
latffp: Larry Hildenbrand
palette: Charlie Heath
trackdisk: Rob Peck
requesters: John Draper (crunch)
speech: Rob Peck
speechtoy: David Lucas
PD's disk.