[HN Gopher] Retiring Tucows Downloads
___________________________________________________________________
Retiring Tucows Downloads
Author : andrewdutton
Score : 297 points
Date : 2021-01-21 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tucows.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tucows.com)
| nevster wrote:
| Well that's one less email I'll be getting every week - the
| "Weekly Statistics Report" for downloads of my software from
| tucows.
|
| As below:
|
| "You receive weekly download and CPC statistics because you are a
| Tucows ARC Subscriber. If you no longer wish to receive this
| communication, please login to ARC, enter the Profile Manager and
| uncheck the box marked "Weekly mailings.
|
| Files: weekly_report_29299_20210110004906-20210117004906.zip"
| degenerate wrote:
| 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
| ardy42 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm really glad they went through the trouble of even doing
| that. They didn't have to.
|
| A lot of it's probably only good for nostalgia, before it's
| totally forgotten without much loss; but as someone who
| recently spent a bunch of time trying to track down 90s FTP
| site mirrors chasing a vague memory of a game, I appreciate it.
| romwell wrote:
| >and others are unrelated to software at all.
|
| 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.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I, ahem, had to look into this as a matter of intellectual
| curiosity -- there is an archive file in the "DOWNLOAD OPTIONS"
| section which holds the .scr Windows screensaver file:
| https://archive.org/download/tucows_71077_Sung_Hi_Lee_2
|
| (On another note, .scr-s are just renamed .exe-s, and it was a
| highly questionable choice to download and run those in their
| heyday as well.)
| ars wrote:
| Maybe email them with your findings? They to care about
| history, maybe they'll be receptive to fixing the issues.
| mdtancsa wrote:
| But where will I download TCPMan and Trumpet Winsock from now???
| Slartie wrote:
| first thought: What, Tucows still existed?
|
| _clicks on link_
|
| second thought: That's not Tucows! Where is the logo with the two
| cows???
| dceddia wrote:
| Wow, end of an era. I guess it realistically ended a while ago,
| but I remember downloading stuff from Tucows when I was a kid
| playing around on the internet with dialup.
|
| I was really surprised to learn recently that they own Ting (the
| cell phone provider) and big domain-related businesses like eNom
| and Hover. Looks like they're doing just fine.
| d23 wrote:
| Reminds me of download.com and how that was such a go-to site for
| me. I still have that in my muscle memory when I open a new tab,
| along with a few others from my childhood.
| TtEdN7jwT wrote:
| I remember downloading x-files windows 98 themes when I was a kid
| on dialup on weekends. good times. Also surprised it still
| exists. was a great time to be into computers.
| [deleted]
| IronWolve wrote:
| 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.
| cecida wrote:
| Downloading Winamp from Tucows so I could listen to illegally
| downloaded NOFX mp3s. The good old days when the WWW was so new
| and exciting for me.
| tpmx wrote:
| > 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 the IA.
|
| (Hoping to be disproved.)
| codazoda wrote:
| 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.
| janfoeh wrote:
| 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...
| paxys wrote:
| Sites like this have a long tail problem. Yes doing a 100% dump
| would be best, but 90% of it is likely stuff that hasn't been
| accessed in years and never will again. So from a resourcing
| point of view it is better to save "most" than none at all.
| stormbrew wrote:
| And yet, all is still better than most. The IA's entire point
| of existence is to preserve that long tail stuff that doesn't
| get preserved otherwise, and they certainly currently hold on
| to things that are far less useful than literally anything on
| tucows was (for eg. a website I worked on in 1995 that
| probably only had a few hundred visitors _even then_ ).
|
| I hope this is just soft wording.
| tpmx wrote:
| > I hope this is just soft wording.
|
| Yeah, I hope that too. Maybe everything except 0.01%
| _really_ problematic content has been transferred to the
| IA.
| tpmx wrote:
| I guess I'm mostly concerned about an authoritative dump from
| those first years until 1996/1997 or so, probably less than 1
| GB.
| cbhl wrote:
| I wonder if someone still has a copy of the Tucows CD-ROMs
| from those days? (Since most folks were still on dial-up
| and everything.)
| jayzalowitz wrote:
| Speaking as a person who faced this, licensing concerns are
| probably driving the mostiness.
| tpmx wrote:
| 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.
| aurizon wrote:
| Yes, I went from audio coupled 120 baud BBS in 1983 to the 56K by
| 1993 and loved Tucows when they emerged. Many happy years spent
| learning at their knee - as others have said, Thanks, Tucows -
| live long and prosper in whatever internet sea you now swim
| in....
| soheil wrote:
| 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.
| strictnein wrote:
| Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of
| sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| It's gone the way of the gopher!
| gruez wrote:
| Is there any meaningful difference between a ftp server and a
| http server with directory listing enabled?
| oriolid wrote:
| With http you lose all the fun with active/passive FTP and
| tricks to get around firewalls. Though stateful firewalls
| already ruined it.
| [deleted]
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| caf wrote:
| 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).
| kevincox wrote:
| > 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| kevincox wrote:
| 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.
| sub7 wrote:
| 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.
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| Hardly. You can install Apache and drop your files in it
| and the default settings make it look pretty much like an
| FTP listing.
| spijdar wrote:
| 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.
| core-questions wrote:
| Gemini says hello!
| sub7 wrote:
| Hello! If only protocols weren't treated as cash cows
| technofiend wrote:
| FTP has some interesting features not found in straight
| HTTP such as charset conversion and my favorite the HOST
| command. HOST was the escape valve for commands you needed
| run that weren't implemented in the FTP protocol itself.
| I'm sure it's a terrible vulnerability now but it was fun
| to use and see what you could make a remote machine do.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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?
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| There is no way to keep an unmaintained feature in. They
| will break so fast and there is no point keeping a broken
| feature in. Just download an FTP client.
| ergo14 wrote:
| You do have to maintain features, fix security issues,
| refactor surfaces get smaller, even unused - bitrotting
| code generates at least some work.
| core-questions wrote:
| 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.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| It's not that bad ... right up until someone finds a
| security problem involving said feature, and the original
| code authors have left.
| reiichiroh wrote:
| Handango and some others that I forget were the equivalent for
| the handheld Palm PDA.
| renewiltord wrote:
| They were such shit though, with the fake download buttons and
| everything.
| yosito wrote:
| 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.
| snoshy wrote:
| It must have been a big reason why these sites fell to
| irrelevance so quickly. And to think of the missed
| opportunities...
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| 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 download
| software from in that era. Disappeared in 2006.
| bityard wrote:
| I remember Happy Puppy. Although the thing I remember most is
| that I won a free 56k 3Com (nee US Robotics) external serial
| modem from them just by entering my name and address into a
| sweepstakes on the main page. It just showed up in the mail one
| day. It was a nice upgrade from our winmodem. My mom was sure
| it was some kind of scam.
| comprev wrote:
| Buying an external 56k US Robotics modem was a giant leap
| when I was a teenager. It opened up the internet as I only
| had a winmodem at the time and RedHat 7.3 didn't play nice.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| felixr wrote:
| Oh wow. I have not heard of or seen tucows for ages. The last
| time i visited their page must have been 15 years ago because it
| looked like
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050715014500/http://www.tucows...
| therealmarv wrote:
| Used Tucows as most reliable source for downloading software for
| Windows back in the days (I think I did not trusted e.g.
| download.com). Will remember all the cows on the early internet
| days ;)
| Octopuz wrote:
| I still have my 'official mirror' T-shirt from Tucows (1994?)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| tucows, jumbo, and x2ftp.oulu.fi were my goto places :-)
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Wow.Just wow.The last time I was on their website was probably
| nearly 20 years ago. No way I would have imagined they not only
| exist but also hiring. Kind of glad they pivoted to other areas.
|
| [Edit]: I occasionally cover tech stocks in my spare time- this
| is definitely one I'll write about!
| artificial wrote:
| Excellent run! It's been ages since I've downloaded things from
| Tucows, mainly late 90s and early 00s. The era of PlanetQuake and
| all the other sites. Hmm, off to the IA for a nostalgia browse...
| xyzal wrote:
| ... and IE for a nostalgia browser
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Let's not get carried away.
| comprev wrote:
| PlanetQuake... the nostalgia is running through my veins! Not
| heard that name in two decades.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Updates are going to be a requirement if you care at all about
| security.
|
| New vulnerabilities are being found in the most popular web
| servers on a regular basis.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > The Internet Archive screen scrapes everything and just
| saves the pages you see, but even that isn't free or trivial
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tehlike wrote:
| Depending on the underlying infrastructure.
|
| Unless you freeze the infrastructure too, this is incorrect.
| canadianfella wrote:
| 12 hour downloads of 7mb Paint Shop Pro trial...
| samsquire wrote:
| 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.
| codazoda wrote:
| I hated Download.com. It was buying up all my favorite download
| sites of the era and shutting them down without integrating
| their features. I think SoftSeek was my favorite and I'm hard
| pressed to find even a screenshot of it these days.
|
| Off to look.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Yes, I was late '90s downloading enthusiast, and SoftSeek was
| the best one, particularly because every app had a
| screenshot.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19991118153527/http://www.softse.
| ..
| oriolid wrote:
| > 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.
| arkitaip wrote:
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| And all those frameworks add so much bloat.
|
| 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.
| wiremine wrote:
| This is the worst part of the internet: Tucows was such a bit
| part of life for so many people, and now it's just... gone. We
| have the internet archive, which is great, but it feels like
| there should be a way to highlight touchstones these sites.
| dimator wrote:
| Well, in this way, the internet is just like real life. How
| many stores in your hometown have lasted 20, 30 years? It's
| hard and it sucks losing them, even though they might not be
| part of your life anymore. They were touchstones to someone's
| past.
|
| My favorite little bookstore was called Readmore, it's been
| gone for 20 years, but every time I see the GNC in it's old
| location, I still get nostalgic. Part of life I guess.
| disgrunt wrote:
| Tucows isn't gone. They're the second largest domain registrar
| in the world. They run OpenSRS and Hover, for example. They
| also run Ting.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Ting was sold to DISH in September. They may have kept the
| ISP part.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| It's a joint venture now apparently.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software - wow internet
| history. I forgot that TUCOWS even stood for that
| canada_dry wrote:
| Back from the days when hotmail.com stood for HTML mail.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| bunch of years before that... but wait, did hotmail really
| mean that?! Not sure I've ever heard that! Or at least also
| forgotten that. Feel like when MS acquired they didn't
| promote/brand it like that so the HTML connection was lost
| (even tho it was obviously a website/webmail etc) :)
| _joel wrote:
| Where will I be able to download my winsock.dll apps now though?
| laumars wrote:
| I didn't even realise Tucows were still around. Man I loved that
| site in the 90s.
|
| So long and thanks for all the fish :'(
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > 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.
| devmunchies wrote:
| do you even use their download site? nobody does anymore. To
| keep it up would be hoarding. We can archive screenshots and
| move on.
| [deleted]
| rado wrote:
| The second best thing after print magazines' CD-ROMs... also
| extinct :-<
| obscura wrote:
| Agreed! I used to love exploring those discs, which were jam-
| packed with new demos and utilities, or new games or add-ons
| for existing ones.
| firecall wrote:
| It's funny how you never know when your last visit to a site will
| be!
|
| One day it's your go-to site for things, the next it's not on
| your radar.
|
| Maybe search engines, mobile, and app stores all contributed to
| changing the .
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| "The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software" ... For a company
| that's now the 2nd large domain name registrar, started and sold
| a successful MVNO, and runs a fiber internet service it's been a
| crazy ride. I had no idea the download site was still up. That
| and Sourceforge were so important at one point.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Now that is a name I had almost forgotten about.
|
| Like many I had plenty of downloads from there, back in the day,
| on the university connection.
| danans wrote:
| 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.
| josh2600 wrote:
| Elliott Noss is super smart and humble. Left a huge impression on
| me when I met him way back in the day as a youngster. He had
| nothing to prove at all, just super bright and very fun to talk
| to; I met him at a tradeshow and he spent 30 minutes with me just
| because he thought our product was cool.
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I register my domains through hover.com to support Tucows. It
| happens to be an excellent registrar.
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| I remember downloading GetRight download manager from there.
| Aeons ago, truly Internet 1.0.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Speaking of nostalgia, I remember downloading Trumpet Winsock
| from Tucows way back when....
| solomonb wrote:
| Me too! I miss the era of the internet that Tucows represents.
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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.
| mdtancsa wrote:
| my fingers still have muscle memory for "ftp ftp.uwasa.fi"
| which I think pre dated cdrom.com (for me anyways)
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Memories!
|
| There was a time where you could replace "www" for "ftp"
| and in most occasions there would be a file listing!
| chrisdhal wrote:
| I was a maintainer of a FAQ that was posted to
| news.answers, which in turn was mirrored at Walnut Creek.
| They would send maintainers free CDs of the archive
| periodically. Good times.
| core-questions wrote:
| 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.
| cairoshikobon wrote:
| 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
| meepmorp wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| pxlpshr wrote:
| Same!! So many fond memories of the early web. I miss what was
| that "new frontier" feeling.
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| How do we get that feeling again? Where is the newness today?
| I miss that feeling so much.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| So say we all
| NDizzle wrote:
| 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...
| cogman10 wrote:
| Adding windows defender by default has gone a LONG ways in
| fixing windows.
| benbristow wrote:
| Well Windows 7 (and Vista?) had it by default but it was
| pretty useless. Basically a user-friendly GUI to the
| firewall with very basic anti-virus. Microsoft released
| Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) which was the precursor
| to what we see now built into 10. It's come a long way.
| markandrewj wrote:
| This brings up memories for me also. I was under the impression
| that Tucows was founded in Canada though, because their
| headquarters is in Toronto. Although most people know them for
| their download site, they have also always been a pretty big
| domain registrar. According to wikipedia, they are the second
| biggest at the moment.
| SummerlyMars wrote:
| A former coworker of mine went to work there, and my immediate
| thought upon learning of this was "The download site?"
|
| It turns out they're doing pretty well for themselves. They
| might not have much brand recognition these days, but they're a
| much bigger company than I thought.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucows
| mikejarema wrote:
| Union Square Ventures invested in them a few years back, and
| blogged about their rationale and some info on where Tucows
| is/has been headed as a business:
|
| https://www.usv.com/writing/2017/02/tucows/
| slg wrote:
| I have used Hover for years. I don't really do anything too
| complex with them, but I have no complaints which is
| basically the best endorsement I can giver for a domain
| registrar.
| [deleted]
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > In 2000, Tucows acquired Linux Weekly News.
|
| _What?_ I had no idea.
|
| There's a reference too [1]. The next article [2] in that
| series (which was a retrospective about five years later)
| goes on to say:
|
| > Meanwhile, by this time [2002], Tucows had come to terms
| with the fact that its acquisition (and ongoing operation) of
| LWN was not helping it, given the directions its business was
| taking. So, after some discussion, LWN was unacquired - it
| was given back to its creators, with Tucows holding on to a
| small piece just in case.
|
| [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/264980/
|
| [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/265813/
| corbet wrote:
| That was a while ago at this point, back when the download
| site was still a significant part of what they did.
|
| The acquisition was at the end of the dotcom boom, and we
| had several options to choose from. We ended up with Tucows
| for a number of reasons, but right near the top was the
| fact that they seemed like truly decent and honest people.
| That decision, I think, is a big part of why LWN still
| exists today.
|
| The end of the download site is definitely a moment in
| nostalgia...but in truth I didn't know they were still
| running it. Tucows has long since moved on; I'm glad they
| are doing well.
| snoshy wrote:
| Reading TFA, that was exactly the sense I got: a wistful
| announcement that a cherished part of the Internet was
| maintained for years beyond most of its users even
| noticed, and is being closed down. It seems readily
| apparent from their actions and words that they truly
| seemed to care about Tucows Downloads, whatever it might
| be worth financially.
|
| Glad to get to the comments and see further reinforcement
| of that feeling. It seems you had a great read on them as
| people. Kudos.
| breck wrote:
| Seeing "TUCOWS" was like smelling something I hadn't
| smelt in decades. I barely remember what it was, just
| have positive associations with that word from my child
| hood. Very cool to read that I'm not alone in that.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They did sell their Ting Mobile division to DISH the other
| month though, so some retrenching has apparently been in
| order.
| Svperstar wrote:
| >Tucows was a huge part of my childhood from 10 to 18 years
| old.
|
| Same. One of the first places I downloaded software in the mid
| 1990s
| tomjen3 wrote:
| For me it seems like a decade or two, but that can't be right
| because I haven't had internet that long.
|
| Maybe it is just that it was a different life and therefore it
| seems like that long ago?
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| They've been hosting downloads since 1993. That's more than
| two decades, and certainly a couple of lifetimes ago for me
| :)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| > 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| 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.
| obscura wrote:
| 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.
| war1025 wrote:
| I own several domains that I registered through Hover.com .
|
| I noticed the billing statement always comes through as from
| Tuwcows Corp, but I didn't realize Tuwcows was it's own thing
| that existed apart from just Hover.
|
| According to Wikipedia, its been around since 1993, so a relative
| dinosaur on the internet. Wild.
| anthony_barker wrote:
| One of the early success stories in Toronto based internet
| companies (besides ISPs).
|
| Hover is pretty good. It looks like their fiber business is
| growing too.
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