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Retiring Tucows Downloads

tucows.com

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Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#101

Post by xtracto »

meepmorp wrote: post #61
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 still have my copy of Walnut Creek's FreeBSD 2.2.3 distribution, a double CD set with Beastie on the front. And we had the internet back then, it was just over a 28.8 modem.

Haha me too! It was such an amazing thing for me, a 12 year old in 1994 in Mexico to actually receive the FreeBSD CDs with all the nice paraphernalia (beastie stickers and whatnot) on it. A friend of my family bought it for me because he was happy I was into computers at that age.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#102

Post by danans »

Though it is now headquartered in Toronto, it is interesting to note that Tucows was originally founded in Flint Michigan, the only internet company I'm aware of that comes from there.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#103

Post by oriolid »

samsquire wrote: post #15

There was something magical about this era when I was a child downloading gameboy emulators like No$GBA. I miss download.com Is there fewer people making desktop software nowadays? It seems there is less software available. It's also very hard to be profitable and monetize software.

> Is there fewer people making desktop software nowadays?

Yes. Developing native desktop apps is more work (Win32 and Cocoa, who even knows those? you'll have to implement the app in both) and these days you'll have to go through the app signing bureaucracy even if you're not using app stores. And good luck with the monetization, especially if you're not distributing through app store or other and paying a huge share for it.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#104

Post by cogman10 »

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.

Those didn't come till they started pumping the site with banners. From there, malware assholes figured out they could advertise with a duplicate "download" button and get a healthy number of clicks (certainly got me more than once).

They went to shit, but didn't start out that way until they started to try and fund their site through a shit ton of ads.

That was a dark day for the internet. Thank goodness for ad blockers.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#105

Post by xtracto »

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?

IIRC at least initially the FTP had some special modes to transfer binary data, whereas HTTP was not as efficient. And of course, HTTP was meant to be "pull only" whereas FTP had upload capabilities too.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#106

Post by obscura »

Haven't thought about Tucows in many years... I used to love exploring it to find new software to try out. There were so many interesting utilities and such to enhance Windows 95/98. Would love to give it one last browse. Ah well! Thanks for the good times, Tucows.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#107

Post by yosito »

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.

I remember a Tucows before the fake download button. But as a kid I definitely downloaded a virus or two on my parent's computer.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#110

Post by tambourine_man »

dmurray wrote: post #75
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…

Trust changes. Software owners do as well. It was also common back in the day to keep running old versions of your apps for whatever reason. It’s much harder and sometimes not possible these days.
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