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Retiring Tucows Downloads

tucows.com

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Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#31

Post by selimthegrim »

SummerlyMars wrote: post #17
ryeguy_24 wrote: post #7

Wow, nostalgia, it's been years since even hearing about Tucows. Tucows was a huge part of my childhood from 10 to 18 years old. Good run and great early repository for software. Thanks Tucows.

A former coworker of mine went to work there, and my immediate thought upon learning of this was "The download site?" It turns out they're doing pretty well for themselves. They might not have much brand recognition these days, but they're a much bigger company than I thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucows

They did sell their Ting Mobile division to DISH the other month though, so some retrenching has apparently been in order.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#32

Post by ars »

degenerate wrote: post #8

The article doesn't link to the Tucows Downloads Archive, for whatever reason it only links to the archive.org homepage. Here's the direct link: https://archive.org/details/tucows It also appears that the archive wasn't manually reviewed; some items are just screenshots, and others are unrelated to software at all. Example (mildly nsfw): https://archive.org/details/tucows_71077_Sung_Hi_Lee_2

Maybe email them with your findings? They to care about history, maybe they'll be receptive to fixing the issues.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#33

Post by selimthegrim »

disgrunt wrote: post #18
wiremine wrote: post #16

This is the worst part of the internet: Tucows was such a bit part of life for so many people, and now it's just... gone. We have the internet archive, which is great, but it feels like there should be a way to highlight touchstones these sites.

Tucows isn't gone. They're the second largest domain registrar in the world. They run OpenSRS and Hover, for example. They also run Ting.

Ting was sold to DISH in September. They may have kept the ISP part.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#35

Post by MisterTea »

solomonb wrote: post #14
ryeguy_24 wrote: post #7

Wow, nostalgia, it's been years since even hearing about Tucows. Tucows was a huge part of my childhood from 10 to 18 years old. Good run and great early repository for software. Thanks Tucows.

Me too! I miss the era of the internet that Tucows represents.

I miss the walnut creek days of ftp.cdrom.com. Many an id demo and FreeBSD isos downloaded. Before that I knew of them from actually buying their CD's in the mid 90's before we had the internet.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#36

Post by bityard »

jaredsohn wrote: post #12

Some related obscure nostalgia - I used to like downloading games from Happy Puppy. https://web.archive.org/web/20000815211217/http://www.happyp... "Happy Puppy was launched on Valentine's Day 1995, establishing itself as the first-ever commercial games site. It was an overnight success and has been the leading gaming lifestyle publication on the web ever since." Related in the sense that it was another site I would…

I remember Happy Puppy. Although the thing I remember most is that I won a free 56k 3Com (nee US Robotics) external serial modem from them just by entering my name and address into a sweepstakes on the main page. It just showed up in the mail one day. It was a nice upgrade from our winmodem. My mom was sure it was some kind of scam.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#37

Post by soheil »

tucows and download.com were the "app stores" of the web before the walled gardens of the big companies today. You could distribute your app to one of these sites and have it be automatically syndicated to thousands of other download sites. This is how distributed web worked. We're making the web more centralized and it's not just social media and youtube.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#38

Post by rzzzt »

degenerate wrote: post #8

The article doesn't link to the Tucows Downloads Archive, for whatever reason it only links to the archive.org homepage. Here's the direct link: https://archive.org/details/tucows It also appears that the archive wasn't manually reviewed; some items are just screenshots, and others are unrelated to software at all. Example (mildly nsfw): https://archive.org/details/tucows_71077_Sung_Hi_Lee_2

I, ahem, had to look into this as a matter of intellectual curiosity -- there is an archive file in the "DOWNLOAD OPTIONS" section which holds the .scr Windows screensaver file: https://archive.org/download/tucows_71077_Sung_Hi_Lee_2

(On another note, .scr-s are just renamed .exe-s, and it was a highly questionable choice to download and run those in their heyday as well.)

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#39

Post by dimator »

wiremine wrote: post #16

This is the worst part of the internet: Tucows was such a bit part of life for so many people, and now it's just... gone. We have the internet archive, which is great, but it feels like there should be a way to highlight touchstones these sites.

Well, in this way, the internet is just like real life. How many stores in your hometown have lasted 20, 30 years? It's hard and it sucks losing them, even though they might not be part of your life anymore. They were touchstones to someone's past.

My favorite little bookstore was called Readmore, it's been gone for 20 years, but every time I see the GNC in it's old location, I still get nostalgic. Part of life I guess.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#40

Post by codazoda »

tpmx wrote: post #10

> We’re pleased to say that much of the software and other assets that made up the Tucows Downloads library have been transferred to our friends at the Internet Archive for posterity. The usage of the word "much" makes it seem like IA crawled most of the archive, "probably". @ Elliot Noss: The real classy way to shut down something as historically important as this would be to transfer a 100% (edit: ~100%) dump to th…

Alas, my app listing for ButtonWiz is gone (maybe I removed it years ago). It was listed in Windows Magazine as one of the top 10 shareware programs sometime around 1998.

That makes it sound bigger than it was, the Top 10 list was a small 1/4 page article that appeared in a bunch of issues.

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