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Retiring Tucows Downloads

tucows.com

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Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#71

Post by janfoeh »

codazoda wrote: post #40
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.

Has your app been around for longer than '98? The screenshots I've found look familiar.

If it was available around, say, '94 or '95, I am almost positive I had it installed at the time I started messing around with the Compuserve Homepage Builder...

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#72

Post by tpmx »

jayzalowitz wrote: post #56
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…

Speaking as a person who faced this, licensing concerns are probably driving the mostiness.

Sure - I'd just like to make sure. So much early content has been deleted from history for no reason at all, really. If there's been a serious effort to save at least the early content from the 1990s I'd be super happy. If everything minus problematic content has been saved, I'd be even happier.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#73

Post by reiichiroh »

soheil wrote: post #37

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.

Handango and some others that I forget were the equivalent for the handheld Palm PDA.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#74

Post by IronWolve »

I use to browse tucows and freshmeat and seeing what new software people released, was fun to see what people created. Just a nice updated list of new applications.

Now I have no idea what people are creating unless they post to a few forums I follow, so limited.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#75

Post by dmurray »

tambourine_man wrote: post #63

Tucows and, the more Mac focused, Version Tracker, where a huge part of the early Web. 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.

> 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.

I think we'd have thought of that as a great development. "In the future, you'll automatically get bug fixes and new features in your programs as they're released." What's not to like? After all, you already trust the developer (the programs were not typically open source).

The justified distrust we have now for software vendors shipping "features" that benefit them rather than us came much later.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#76

Post by sub7 »

kevincox wrote: post #60
strictnein wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.

> Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely. You can just as effectively have HTTP sites that are simple listings of available software. I don't think FTP removal is really relevant here except for nostalgia.

Disagree. FTP as a protocol made self hosting all kinds of things much easier. We could soon live in a world where people self host their own data powered by protocols that will borrow heavily from FTP.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#77

Post by core-questions »

MisterTea wrote: post #35
solomonb wrote: post #14

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.

I remember getting Windows 95 on the Internet, not having a browser, but having the command line FTP client built in and FTPing to cdrom.com to download a copy of Netscape so as to be able to get browsing.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#78

Post by ergo14 »

ryandrake wrote: post #62
strictnein wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.

I wish “removing features” wasn’t such a popular thing for software companies. I mean I understand the cost of having complexity but is it REALLY that bad to just keep an unmaintained feature going that people use?

You do have to maintain features, fix security issues, refactor surfaces get smaller, even unused - bitrotting code generates at least some work.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#79

Post by gruez »

strictnein wrote: post #46
soheil wrote: post #37

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.

Is there any meaningful difference between a ftp server and a http server with directory listing enabled?

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#80

Post by core-questions »

ryandrake wrote: post #62
strictnein wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.

I wish “removing features” wasn’t such a popular thing for software companies. I mean I understand the cost of having complexity but is it REALLY that bad to just keep an unmaintained feature going that people use?

Well, now that QA is a mature process and people expect tests on every single thing, it's more "expensive" to keep a feature around, as you have to keep on testing it.
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