Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Retiring Tucows Downloads

tucows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 203 posts

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#91

Post by kevincox »

Spivak wrote: post #88
kevincox wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

HTTP is one layer too low to replace FTP. HTTP can provide the transport but not the application semantics. We would have to agree on a protocol that uses HTTP to replace FTP.

That is a fair point. WebDAV seems to provide the listing and update semantics that you are looking for. WebDAV is widely supported by webservers so I think it is a great replacement for FTP.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#92

Post by snoshy »

renewiltord wrote: post #85
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.

They were such shit though, with the fake download buttons and everything.

It must have been a big reason why these sites fell to irrelevance so quickly. And to think of the missed opportunities...

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#93

Post by devmunchies »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #55

> Old sites are a maintenance challenge and therefore a risk. Maintaining the Tucows Downloads site pulls people away from the work that moves our businesses forward. This is the larger tragedy.

do you even use their download site? nobody does anymore. To keep it up would be hoarding. We can archive screenshots and move on.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#94

Post by spijdar »

sub7 wrote: post #76
kevincox wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Did it? I've always had more trouble throwing up quick FTP servers vs a quick "python3 -m http.server" for a throwaway HTTP server.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#96

Post by bitwize »

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 HappyPuppy back when it was run by Jennifer Diane Reitz, who sold it off in 1995 or 1996 and whose career since has been... interesting, to say the least.

She changed the background to one of the puppy mascot peeing on the Communications Decency Act, back when the "Blue Ribbon Campaign" was a thing.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#98

Post by cogman10 »

NDizzle wrote: post #44
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.

Yep. It was one of your first stops after you reformatted Windows. Like you, I haven't heard about them in a long time. I haven't thought about them in a long time, either. Guess that means Windows got more stable? I don't reformat anymore...

Adding windows defender by default has gone a LONG ways in fixing windows.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#99

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #79
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.

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

[deleted]

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#100

Post by cairoshikobon »

core-questions wrote: post #77
MisterTea wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows has and still does an excellent built-in FTP API also that was very handy. It works even on Windows 95 all the way to Windows 10.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wininet/n...

Downloading from HTTP has always been messy, specially for big files. The FTP API been always rock solid.

Edit: Apparently the Gopher API is also still available!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wininet/n...

and even has websites!

In January 2020, Veronica indexed 395 gopher servers,[16] within which it indexed approximately 4.5 million unique selectors. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher/0/v2/vstat

Post reply on HN