Retiring Tucows Downloads • Hacker News Board

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#181

Post by kalleboo » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:22 AM UTC

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'd have been fine with it from a user control/privacy perspectie (this was back in the day when people were fine downloading and running random shareware with zero sandboxing or memory protection whatsoever), but we didn't have the bandwidth or memory to do it.

With a modem you were almost never online. You maybe went online for an hour or two in the evening. If everything started updating as soon as you dialed up your 28.8k modem, you'd never get anything done. And with the tiny RAM sizes and poor multitasking of those old OSes, background update daemons and such were out of the question.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#182

Post by billpg » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:39 AM UTC

mdtancsa wrote: post #111

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.

my fingers still have muscle memory for "ftp ftp.uwasa.fi" which I think pre dated cdrom.com (for me anyways)

Showing my age. src.doc.ic.ac.uk

It was known to some at my university (or maybe just me) pronounced as "Srk Dok Ik Ak Uk".

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#183

Post by skocznymroczny » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:47 AM UTC

ai_ja_nai wrote: post #20

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.

I remember downloading GetRight download manager from there. Aeons ago, truly Internet 1.0.

Don't forget Teleport to download websites for offline viewing.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#184

Post by anarcat » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #159

gruez wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

FTP had better support for doing server-server transfer - you could start a receiver on machine 2 and then trigger a transfer from machine 1 to machine 2 without using your own bandwidth. I guess you can achieve the same thing by doing curl on machine 2 in a screen session or something, but it feels a lot less elegant.

wow. I used ftp for years and even ran my own server for a while and never knew that was a thing. is that something that was actually used to mirror those sites? Debian mirrors certainly don't use this (anymore?) at least, for example..

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#185

Post by gadders » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:09 AM UTC

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.

Agreed. I used to love getting my Windows 3.1 freeware from there.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#186

Post by thequux » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

caf wrote: post #134

xtracto wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 'binary mode' of FTP just meant not to translate line endings or potentially character set, in opposition to 'text mode'. The advantage with HTTP wasn't efficiency, it was that resuming interrupted downloads was typically possible with FTP but not HTTP (because ranged GET took a long while to get support in both servers and clients).

The difference between binary and text is deeper than just line endings and character set; PDP-10's, for example, stored text 5 7-bit characters to a 36-bit word. In text mode, it would unpack that to ASCII, whereas binary mode would pack two words into 9 bytes. If you transferred in the wrong mode, you'd just get an amorphous blob of protoplasm and need to transfer again

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#187

Post by fletchowns » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:46 AM UTC

anarcat wrote: post #184

lmm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTP had better support for doing server-server transfer - you could start a receiver on machine 2 and then trigger a transfer from machine 1 to machine 2 without using your own bandwidth. I guess you can achieve the same thing by doing curl on machine 2 in a screen session or something, but it feels a lot less elegant.

wow. I used ftp for years and even ran my own server for a while and never knew that was a thing. is that something that was actually used to mirror those sites? Debian mirrors certainly don't use this (anymore?) at least, for example..

It's called FXP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol

FlashFXP was a popular client that supported this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashFXP

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#188

Post by xorcist » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:46 AM UTC

anarcat wrote: post #184

lmm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTP had better support for doing server-server transfer - you could start a receiver on machine 2 and then trigger a transfer from machine 1 to machine 2 without using your own bandwidth. I guess you can achieve the same thing by doing curl on machine 2 in a screen session or something, but it feels a lot less elegant.

wow. I used ftp for years and even ran my own server for a while and never knew that was a thing. is that something that was actually used to mirror those sites? Debian mirrors certainly don't use this (anymore?) at least, for example..

It's called fxp and you can still find information on it. In the top site scene it was widely used.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#189

Post by eythian » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:12 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #159

gruez wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

FTP had better support for doing server-server transfer - you could start a receiver on machine 2 and then trigger a transfer from machine 1 to machine 2 without using your own bandwidth. I guess you can achieve the same thing by doing curl on machine 2 in a screen session or something, but it feels a lot less elegant.

I think scp can do stuff like this, I remember occasionally hitting it when wanting to move a file between two servers that can't talk to each other, expecting it would use my bandwidth/route for the transfer.

Re: Retiring Tucows Downloads

#190

Post by np_tedious » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

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?

If it's unidirectional (user only downloads) and the files aren't crazy big, then given today's connection speeds and reliability I would say no not really.