Fetch Softworks Sponsoring TidBITS -- We're pleased to announce our latest long-term sponsor, Fetch Softworks, makers of the Mac's longest-standing FTP client, Fetch. Jim Matthews first created Fetch for Dartmouth College back in 1989, and Dartmouth soon made it available for free for educational institutions and non-profits, and as shareware for everyone else. Fetch quickly outpaced all the other Macintosh FTP clients of the time, programs like HyperFTP, XferIt, and others I wrote about in the first edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh in 1993. That was when I started corresponding with Jim, and I ended up including Fetch on the book's disk with other such influential software as MacTCP, Eudora, and StuffIt Expander.
Unfortunately, Jim had other responsibilities at Dartmouth and for a number of years wasn't able to devote all his time to Fetch, causing development to lag. Fetch Softworks came into being in December of 2000, when Jim went almost all the way on the television show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and used some of his winnings to buy Fetch's name and source code from Dartmouth. Working mostly on his own, Jim has maintained Fetch's basic look and feel while bringing the program up to speed on Mac OS X and retaining compatibility all the way back to System 7. There are plenty of other FTP clients now, but whenever I run into problems with wacky FTP servers, I always turn to Fetch, which handles them with aplomb thanks to its long years of evolution during a less-standardized time on the Internet. Just recently, Jim brought on noted Macintosh programmer Miro Jurisic, who has twice won the MacHax Group's Best Hack Contest at MacHack, so we may see revisions to Fetch a bit more quickly than in the past.
To kick off their sponsorship, Fetch Softworks is offering $5 off Fetch exclusively for TidBITS readers, so be sure to check out the sponsorship area above for the necessary coupon code. [ACE]
