For someone who hadn't lived through that era to really understand how valuable a collection of shareware/freeware software on a disk was back then, you have to understand that it was an era of information scarcity.<p>Nowadays you can easily get your hands on pretty much any software you want in a matter of seconds. Back then, before most people were on the internet, your options were:<p>- buy it from the local computer store<p>- buy it from an ad in a computer magazine<p>- type it in from a program listing in a magazine or a book<p>- log in to a bulletin board system (BBS) and download it through your modem<p>- trade some software at a user's group (where you could maybe pick up some Fred Fish disks)<p>BBS's actually had pretty good collections of software, but the software was scattered over many of them, and Amiga BBS's were relatively rare compared to the legions of PC-centered BBS's.<p>Fred Fish provided the valuable service of collecting all that freeware for you, so you didn't have to hunt around for it yourself -- all you had to do was get ahold of his disks (of which there were literally hundreds).