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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.
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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?
> Old sites are a maintenance challenge and therefore a risk. Hard disagree unless you want/need to update it. They’ve moved it to internet archive, so I’m happy, but still a dumb statement.
Even if the software it was running on never had a bug finding, the hardware would eventually fail and it'd have to be updated to run on modern software. Coupled with the fact that bugs do pop up in operating systems, web servers, etc, it is no free to maintain. The Internet Archive screen scrapes everything and just saves the pages you see, but even that isn't free or trivial if you don't already have the software.
That’s what I’m suggesting: you run a big screen scrape job, disable the search and any other forms (review entry or comments) and host that. At the end of the day, you have an unchanged archive running on your existing www server.
At least that’s how I’ve kept up old stuff that isn’t popular anymore but still pulls in enough visitors and ads to cover costs.
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> 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.
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
Your example is software.
It is a "screensaver", a program that displays something other than a static image on the screen when the computer is idle (which prevented CRT burn-in).
Those used to be popular back in the day, and long after few people had CRTs around.
The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software - wow internet history. I forgot that TUCOWS even stood for that
Back from the days when hotmail.com stood for HTML mail.
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.
Same. One of the first places I downloaded software in the mid 1990s
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.
I feel like native desktop development has stagnated a lot in the past 10 years. But Electron and other frameworks have enabled hundreds of desktop software that are basically web tech based.
Windows Calculator now consumes 12 MB of RAM. Sure, 12 MB is nothing when systems have 8+ GB, but if you think about the fact that it hasn't really changed much since Windows 3.1, you have to wonder why it takes a couple orders of magnitude more memory without having significantly more functionality.
I bet if DOOM were to be written today, even using the same assets, it would be a 2 GB install that consumed 4 GB of RAM while running.
> Old sites are a maintenance challenge and therefore a risk. Hard disagree unless you want/need to update it. They’ve moved it to internet archive, so I’m happy, but still a dumb statement.
New vulnerabilities are being found in the most popular web servers on a regular basis.