History

KingFisher's immense popularity had caused me to invest far more time in the evolution of the program than I had originally planned. When it finally became time to redesign the program to handle a significantly enhanced meta-data dictionary in preparation for the immense databases required by Fred's move to a CD-ROM distribution, I saw an opportunity to obtain some compensation for the thousands of hours I had spent on KingFisher.

KingFisher 2 was designed as a client-server system, enabling databases to be properly locked by the server, and allowing multiple clients (such as multiple ARexx processes for a BBS, and multiple GUI clients for user-interaction) to simultaneously access multiple databases. This design would enable potentially dozens of clients to access the database with a minimum of overhead (10 kb of memory for an ARexx client, for example). In other words, this was going to be a KingFisher for everybody.

KingFisher 2 was able to select, retrieve from disk, and decode variable size database records containing arbitrary meta-data in the widely used Product Info format, allowing search operations to retrieve records based on such criteria as release date, version number, author(s) of the software, installation size, type of development system, minimum memory requirements, etc. The software provided a fully resizable GUI, complete i18n¹, persistence of search patterns and search results, independently configurable display and print formats, and a whole lot more.

For all of its highly advanced features, KingFisher 2 was not as well-received as its predecessor. Although I received over 60 registrations for the program from all over the world, the collapse of Commodore, and the rise of widely accessible ftp sites (especially Aminet), spelled the eventual doom for distributions by floppy or CD-ROM. By 1995 registrations became noticably fewer, and by early 1996 the trickle of registrations came to an end.

I released a few more updates to the software, fixing some bugs, adding some features, completing some ideas that I had wanted to finish; and so, KingFisher 2.26 is the very last, final release of this software.

What's Available?

KingFisher 2 evolved up through version 2.26 (that's the 26th release of version 2, for those of you who mistakenly think that 1.26 is the same as 1.2.6):

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).