History

At the time (around 1991) many Amiga computers were still without hard disks (not for any technical lack, but because applications on the Amiga had always been lean enough to fit (or at least run from) a single 880K floppy disk.

A program named ``Aquarium'' had long served the Amiga community as a search tool for Fred Fish's ``Fish Disk'' distribution. Aquarium's only serious failing was its inability to store its database on more than a single disk volume. In the case of a floppy disk database, this meant that Aquarium was quickly running out of the space it needed to keep up with Fred Fish's prolific collecting and publishing of software.

My self-appointed role to collect Fish Disk descriptions from Usenet postings and laboriously add them to the Aquarium database, updates to which I then made available widely, was such a time-consuming effort that I chose to spend five times that amount of time writing a replacement for Aquarium: KingFisher.

Some of the nicest features of KingFisher was its ability to read Fred's description files (even when embedded in email or Usenet postings) and magically add these files to the database. It was also able to seamlessly leap across any number of floppy disks to store its database (and this was fully configurable). KingFisher's keyword search also featured logical expressions, and it was still three times faster with that than the old Aquarium. And an innovative new feature provided for a means to traverse the database in version-order, moving forward or backwards through successive releases of a particular piece of software.

Life of the Software

KingFisher was released on 1-Dec-1992, and although it met with some criticism at first it soon became obvious that I had a winner on my hands: I began to receive thousands of emails, postcards from all around the world and from people I had never heard of, letters of thanks, subscriptions to user group newsletters, even several financial contributions. Several magazines published glowing reviews of the software, complete with pictures of the program in action.

The software went through a variety of upgrades over the next two years or so. The program was finally able adjust its display according to the Kickstart 2.0 display database, even run on a 2024 display. It became possible to select different screen fonts for the display, a search would highlight the keywords in the custom listview, and an ARexx port made it possible for the program to be controlled from other software, even serve as a search engine for a BBS.

Eventually, however, I saw that certain feature requests would take inordinate amounts of time to implement and would, at the same time, cripple the code base beyond all hope. Fred Fish's move to a CD-ROM distribution also made me think that KingFisher needed an overhaul. And so it became time to redesign the software from the ground up. The result of that effort was KingFisher 2.

What's Available?

KingFisher evolved up through version 1.40 (that's the 40th release of version 1, for those of you who mistakenly think that 1.40 is the same as 1.4). Alas, the latest version for which source code is still available is 1.37, and that's what you can download:

The software's source code is currently unavailable for a variety of reasons, but my intent is to provide it in the not too distant future. It will be licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).