61–70 of 203 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.
Besides finding new stuff (which was awesome), in those days you had to manually check in those sites to see if there were new versions of your apps. I'd be very surprised if you told me back then that we're all OK with apps calling home to check for updates regularly.
Hover is pretty good. It looks like their fiber business is growing too.
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.
For me it seems like a decade or two, but that can't be right because I haven't had internet that long. Maybe it is just that it was a different life and therefore it seems like that long ago?
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.
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
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
> 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.
I'm really glad they went through the trouble of even doing that. They didn't have to.
A lot of it's probably only good for nostalgia, before it's totally forgotten without much loss; but as someone who recently spent a bunch of time trying to track down 90s FTP site mirrors chasing a vague memory of a game, I appreciate it.
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.
Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.