Fred Fish Disks - what do you think?

[Shot97]

There was a place with the adfs, but it went under over a year ago. Makes me wish I would have grabbed them all, but then again, I'm not the kind of person that wants them all, I just want the specific ones I might have use for. I'll see if I can't find the link to the old place I used to get them from, and then punch that into the way back machine, possible they might have saved something... Although probably not the downloads themselves. You could make adfs of the ones on Aminet in a somewhat "easy" process. There are a couple tools for viewing/manipulating/creating adfs for windows machines. You could create an adf using such a tool (there's a directory opus for Windows, although I use a shell extention that treats adfs as actual folders on my computers), then drag and drop the lhas from Aminet. Still a tedious process, but much better than creating a thousand real floppies.

[ptyerman]

I have no need, I have all the Fish collection on several CD's, and like you said it's available on Aminet and elsewhere.
It's not available as ADF's so that would be a useful resource, it matters not that it was available somewhere once, what matters is that it's not available now.
Hence why I suggested making ADF's of them and making them available as a online resource.
What you suggest could be done but it's a lot of messing about. Most importantly by doing it that way you will lose the original disk structure and layout, that is important to keep too when archiving a collection. Much better to ADF the original disks and save the layout and structure too.

[Zippy Zapp]

So I understand, do you have the whole set of actual floppies? Wasn't there like 1000 disks? If so that would be a large undertaking but would probably be an awesome thing to do for actual disk .ADFs. I think I would use a SuperCard Pro and a PC drive to image them though. Would be a lot less wear then going the Amiga route. With SuperCard Pro you can save it right to an ADF.

Very cool that you have all of them. I thought there was a source for the ADFs but I can't seem to find it now.

[intric8]

So I understand, do you have the whole set of actual floppies? Wasn't there like 1000 disks?

In digital format, yes. All 1000 disks. They are all organized by disk in sets of 100. However, they are not ADFs. Each and every program is available via a folder structure. Like this:

Building ADFs for all 1000 probably wouldn't be feasible. I'm talking to an A-List engineer to see if there might be a relatively easy way to script a solution. To that end, I'd probably have to also create a batch script that Zips all 1000 disks that I have individually, so people can pull each one down as a whole unit. And another to match the text file to each disk to generate pages.

It's not an insurmountable problem, but one that requires a bit more thought by a pro who does this kind of thing for a living.

[Zippy Zapp]

Gotcha. Yeah that would for sure be a pain. You are right, any type of automation would definitely be the way to go. Could be feasible with an Automator workflow on the Mac.

[intric8]

OK Guys, I'd like to show you what I'm thinking.

Below are 3 mockups of a new section of the site, which I would add to the header after Games.

The mocks included show the landing page, a typical disk page, and a search result page.

The index would be a historical article and "shrine" of sorts to Fred and his work in the freeware/shareware community and its impact on the Amiga community.

The Disk page would be a parsed bit that is found in the gigantic text-file found elsewhere. This is also very similar to the disk pages found on Aminet if you know the disk number you're looking for. This page, I think, could use more thought. For example, I think if the database had a record of a program Author on more than one program/disk, that would turn into a link. If you clicked it, it would return Search Results with each disk that author was assigned to.

The Search results page is pretty self-explanatory. Each result would point to a Disk page.

Thoughts? Ideas? Rotten tomatoes?

Index page/Landing page

Disk Page - the main content pages. I've made it so that the entire disk can be pulled down (large button at the top) and each individual file, too, since those have been disseminated on Aminet similarly a long time ago. Also, if a program's author is in the DB more than once, it would be a link to search results.

Search Results

[Zippy Zapp]

Nice! That looks awesome. Clean, modern and retro all at once.

[intric8]

Having all of this data, and discovering that Aminet (whom worked closely with Fred at one stage) has everything as separate files I'm quite tempted to link up the individual files as links to downloads, too, on the Disk pages. Users would be presented with the large "Download Disk #" at the top of the pages which would have an entire disk's contents, but each program could be its own individual link, too, down the page as a red link for each file name.

I've researched the Fred Fish disks for a while now and I've yet to come across any readme's that explicitly forbid this concept. Seems like Aminet would have respected that if so. Maybe not... I don't want to step on any toes of course, but I've not actually found those sentiments. Doesn't mean they don't exist, but after reading about Fred quite a bit, I really think he'd be all about getting the software out there in any means possible. Originally it was disks because all there was. Then it went to CD-ROMs. And then he worked with Aminet... for all I know it was his idea to upload them all individually!

But to take a random example, if I go to Disk #405 and do a search on Aminet for the program "GIFMachine.lha" I can instantly find it. Seems linking those file names up would be a nice option for folks that actually browse a page or two and find something, but don't want the entire disk of LHAs. I feel like if there were ADFs, that's be a whole different story. But an entire repository of ADFs doesn't exist anywhere. Every disk is a zipped up archive of individual LHAs.

[leighb2282]

I would be against links to Aminet - for the simple reason that for example a search on Aminet would for example only bring up the latest version of a program, wheras the beauty of fish disks is you can search for any version of an application that you want to get (take NorthC for example, Aminet only has version 1.3 but Fred included many versions of this compiler package throughout the timeline of Fish disks - it was very useful to be able to get an older version when the newest didn't work for me.

ALso, I recently found this FTP server which is a complete (I think) archive of Freds disks, ordered by disk and all programs presented in .lha format if you were to provide links to individual programs this might be a good resource to use as it would preserve links to the correct disk/version of an app.

just my 2cents

Having all of this data, and discovering that Aminet (whom worked closely with Fred at one stage) has everything as separate files I'm quite tempted to link up the individual files as links to downloads, too, on the Disk pages. Users would be presented with the large "Download Disk #" at the top of the pages which would have an entire disk's contents, but each program could be its own individual link, too, down the page as a red link for each file name.

I've researched the Fred Fish disks for a while now and I've yet to come across any readme's that explicitly forbid this concept. Seems like Aminet would have respected that if so. Maybe not... I don't want to step on any toes of course, but I've not actually found those sentiments. Doesn't mean they don't exist, but after reading about Fred quite a bit, I really think he'd be all about getting the software out there in any means possible. Originally it was disks because all there was. Then it went to CD-ROMs. And then he worked with Aminet... for all I know it was his idea to upload them all individually!

But to take a random example, if I go to Disk #405 and do a search on Aminet for the program "GIFMachine.lha" I can instantly find it. Seems linking those file names up would be a nice option for folks that actually browse a page or two and find something, but don't want the entire disk of LHAs. I feel like if there were ADFs, that's be a whole different story. But an entire repository of ADFs doesn't exist anywhere. Every disk is a zipped up archive of individual LHAs.

[intric8]

Leigh:

I would be against links to Aminet

That's not what I meant I would do. I would host everything here. What I meant was if you did a search for an individual program's file name on Aminet, you could find that one file. It was more a revelation that the programs had been broken down to their individual parts.

I'd represent everything as packages and disks as shown in the mocks. I'm just saying it would be very easy to make each file name (in the mock for "Disk page" as a red link to the file itself - here - in addition to the entire disk zipped up, which you could download from the top of the page as well.

Freds disks, ordered by disk and all programs presented in .lha format if you were to provide links to individual programs this might be a good resource to use as it would preserve links to the correct disk/version of an app.

That's what I'm trying to say, except that I would host them here and not hot-link to external sites. But I'd also host the original Zipped up packages of all of the original disks. ADFs would be ideal, but I don't think I have an easy means to do that (nor has anyone else ever tried to do that... it would take a ton of work - more than I can offer right now).