Fred Fish (November 4, 1952 – April 20, 2007) was a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger and his series of freeware disks for the Amiga .
6-463: Fish worked for Cygnus Solutions in the 1990s before leaving for Be Inc. in 1998. In 1978, he self-published User Survival Guide for TI-58/59 Master Library . It was advertised in enthusiast newsletters covering the TI-59 programmable calculator. Fish also initiated the "GeekGadgets" project, a GNU standard environment for AmigaOS and BeOS . Fred Fish was married to Michelle Fish (née Norman) at
12-524: A number of cases working under non-disclosure to produce tools used for initial bringup of software for a new chip design. Cygnus was also the original developer of Cygwin , a POSIX layer and the GNU toolkit port to the Microsoft Windows operating system family, and of eCos , an embedded real-time operating system . In the 2001 documentary film Revolution OS , Tiemann indicates that
18-513: 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. Cygnus Solutions Cygnus Solutions , originally Cygnus Support , was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore , Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software . Its tagline was: Making free software affordable . For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were
24-412: 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 Amiga enthusiast clubs. Contributors submitted applications and source code and the best of these each month were assembled and released as a diskette . Since
30-575: The maintainers of several key GNU software products, including the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils (which included the GNU Assembler and Linker ). It was also a major contributor to the GCC project and drove the change in the project's management from having a single gatekeeper to having an independent committee. Cygnus developed BFD , and used it to help port GNU to many architectures, in
36-531: The time of his death. He died of a heart attack at his home in Idaho on Friday, April 20, 2007. The Amiga Library Disks – colloquially referred to as Fish Disks (a term coined by Perry Kivolowitz at a Jersey Amiga User Group meeting) – had a reach that included most all Amiga users in the world. Fish would distribute his disks around the world in time for regional and local user group meetings, which in turn duplicated them for local distribution. Typically, only
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