14 ms·

Retiring Tucows Downloads

512 points by andrewdutton 6y ago

felixr 6y ago
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.com/preview/194967 https://web.archive.org/web/20050715014500/http://www.tucows...
artificial 6y ago
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 6y ago
  ... and IE for a nostalgia browser
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    Let's not get carried away.
- comprev 6y ago
  PlanetQuake... the nostalgia is running through my veins! Not heard that name in two decades.
Scoundreller 6y ago
> 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.
- tehlike 6y ago
  Depending on the underlying infrastructure. Unless you freeze the infrastructure too, this is incorrect.
- gmiller123456 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    > 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.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  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.
rado 6y ago
The second best thing after print magazines' CD-ROMs... also extinct :-<
- obscura 6y ago
  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.
- Channel 6y ago
  I miss brand new, big, hulking Computer Shoppers. It was like a Christmas wish book every month!
ryeguy_24 6y ago
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.
- solomonb 6y ago
  Me too! I miss the era of the internet that Tucows represents.
  - MisterTea 6y ago
    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.
    - meepmorp 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
    - core-questions 6y ago
      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.
      - 6y ago
degenerate 6y ago
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 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 https://archive.org/details/tucows_71077_Sung_Hi_Lee_2
- ars 6y ago
  Maybe email them with your findings? They to care about history, maybe they'll be receptive to fixing the issues.
- rzzzt 6y ago
  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 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.)
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    > it was a highly questionable choice to download and run those in their heyday as well I never let that stop me! I was going to have my realistic fish aquarium screensaver, come hell or high water. Besides, I could always reformat. I had that Windows XP serial key memorized, after all!
    - legends2k 6y ago
      That's exactly me, you described there!
- ardy42 6y ago
  > 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 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tpmx 6y ago
> 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.)
- paxys 6y ago
  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.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.)
  - stormbrew 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      > 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.
jaredsohn 6y ago
Some related obscure nostalgia - I used to like downloading games from Happy Puppy. https://web.archive.org/web/20000815211217/http://www.happypuppy.com/about/ 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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
  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.
samsquire 6y ago
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.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    - Marsymars 6y ago
      For Doom, you don’t have to guess! There are half-dozen source ports that are still under active development - some of them have fairly high system requirements in terms of CPU/GPU/RAM for advanced graphical features, but they’re generally much smaller than 2GB in size. e.g. GZDoom is 16 MB, not including the game assets.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      The bloat of abstraction is a small price to pay for the deathmarch of progress. When you look at the ever growing chasm that software needs to fill, it all makes sense. Consider how the most modern computer most of us could even write an emulator for is over 40 years old. Abstraction is the only way we have a hope of meeting hardware where it has progressed. Just compare the best game anyone could build with z80 assembly vs. Unreal Engine / Unity. It's easy to pick on a 12MB calculator app, but don't let that rob you of being truly humbled by what can be built today.
wiremine 6y ago
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.
- disgrunt 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Ting was sold to DISH in September. They may have kept the ISP part.
    - richardwhiuk 6y ago
      It's a joint venture now apparently.
- dimator 6y ago
  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.
  - artificial 6y ago
    Ah, bookstores! The travesty of consolidation in the last 25 years really cements things. I miss the independent retailers and variety. Kinda makes you think about having total recall and being able to revisit what once was.
- Svperstar 6y ago
dceddia 6y ago
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.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Ahh..the sound of dial up and playing connection roulette. I got a fluttery feeling just thinking about it.
d23 6y ago
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.
cecida 6y ago
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.
aurizon 6y ago
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....
therealmarv 6y ago
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 ;)
josh2600 6y ago
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.
TtEdN7jwT 6y ago
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.
soheil 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    > 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.
    - sub7 6y ago
      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.
      - spijdar 6y ago
        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 6y ago
        Gemini says hello!
        sub7 6y ago
canadianfella 6y ago
12 hour downloads of 7mb Paint Shop Pro trial...
_joel 6y ago
Where will I be able to download my winsock.dll apps now though?
laumars 6y ago
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 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway5752 6y ago
"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.
tambourine_man 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  > 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.
anthony_barker 6y ago
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.
jbverschoor 6y ago
tucows, jumbo, and x2ftp.oulu.fi were my goto places :-)
IronWolve 6y ago
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.
pjmlp 6y ago
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.
war1025 6y ago
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.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software - wow internet history. I forgot that TUCOWS even stood for that
- canada_dry 6y ago
  Back from the days when hotmail.com stood for HTML mail.
  - ChrisArchitect 6y ago
    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) :)
    - tdeck 6y ago
      I think canada_dry is right. They used to spell it HoTMaiL.
      - einr 6y ago
        Yes, it briefly had this abomination of a logo before adopting a more sensible identity: https://logodix.com/logo/715204.gif https://logodix.com/logo/715204.gif
        StavrosK 6y ago
        Oh God, the 1990, it hurts.
danans 6y ago
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.
obscura 6y ago
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.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  For me freshmeat.net was the source of new software around that kinda timeframe. But I did help a few people download browsers, and better FTP clients from tucows. There was a related site, an index of available software, but I can't remember the name. I remember it had an abbreviation, something like "chase" and hosted mostly shareware stuff. But the details elude me.
mdtancsa 6y ago
But where will I download TCPMan and Trumpet Winsock from now???
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  That's a great question, retrocomputing enthusiasts better grab what they need for their dream retro installs.
Octopuz 6y ago
I still have my ‘official mirror’ T-shirt from Tucows (1994?)
cosmodisk 6y ago
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!
Slartie 6y ago
first thought: What, Tucows still existed? clicks on link second thought: That's not Tucows! Where is the logo with the two cows???
firecall 6y ago
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 .
nevster 6y ago
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"
hermitcrab 6y ago
I've been selling Windows and Mac software online since 2005, so I remember them well. Tucows and similar sites were quite an important part of selling software online as an Indie back then. But they became less and less relevant as search engines improved. Eventually most of the download sites just became automatically generated online garbage heaps, trying to trick you into downloading things you didn't want, adding dodgy brower toolbar extensions and pushing fake awards ( https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-award... ). In some ways it is good that download sites are less relevant, but we have just swapped one lot of gatekeepers for another (mostly Google and Apple).
Channel 6y ago
Tucows made lots of Macs great! With a Mac, it was sometimes hard to find software. Tucows usually had something for you!
pomian 6y ago
Great memories of using Tucows. It was a dependable source of software. Have a similar feeling using f-droid now. Look for a useful tool, and find something completely different, that is either useful or fun.
gsmethells 6y ago
End of an era. I remember using them consistently in the mid- to late-90’s. Sad to see them go but change is the only constant in life. Goodbye old friend!
kumarvvr 6y ago
Pleasantly surprised to know Tucows is a thriving internet company. Nostalgia overload. I remember downloading so much stuff from tucows.
anonymousiam 6y ago
Tucows is still a domain registry. (See: https://tucowsdomains.com https://tucowsdomains.com) In my experience, they are one of the shadier ones, but maybe they are all bad these days. For example, if a rare domain (E.g. any three-letter .com) is registered with them and about to expire, instead of releasing it as they should, it will be held for auction.
andrew_ 6y ago
Man... I had some of the first freeware programs I developed listed on Tucows. They were crucial to developing a userbase. I had no idea they were still around, and I'm thrilled to see they made it this far. Farewell, old friend!
pupdogg 6y ago
Nostalgia for sure! Tucows was one of the originals for me. Back when AOL was still running on 28.8k...thank you for being a part of my childhood and the start of the internet revolution! Tucows, Lycos, Geocities...wow! Where has time gone?!?!
lathiat 6y ago
Just this week I was trying to find an animated Windows 98 startup screen replacement I used of a borg cube.. couldn't quite find the exact one but found a few linked on tucows and FTP archives of tucows :)
juststeve 6y ago
pour one out for tucows
StavrosK 6y ago
Here it is, for your nostalgic pleasure (try Arizona, it works): https://web.archive.org/web/19970212181139/http://www.tucows.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19970212181139/http://www.tucows... I'm amazed at how many clicks you have to go through to actually see software. No "top 10" list at the start, no "popular", nothing. You have to pick a mirror, which brings you to an almost empty page, click a small "Windows 95" link hidden on the left sidebar, then pick a category, and only then you see the actual software. Odd how much UX leeway you have when you're about the only thing on the web.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Wow!! That’s a blast from the past. Goodbye and Thanks!
moltar 6y ago
That thing was still alive? Wow.

512 points by andrewdutton 6y ago

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.com/preview/194967 https://web.archive.org/web/20050715014500/http://www.tucows...

artificial 6y ago

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 6y ago
... and IE for a nostalgia browser
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  Let's not get carried away.
comprev 6y ago
PlanetQuake... the nostalgia is running through my veins! Not heard that name in two decades.

Scoundreller 6y ago

> 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.

tehlike 6y ago
Depending on the underlying infrastructure. Unless you freeze the infrastructure too, this is incorrect.
gmiller123456 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  > 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.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
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.

rado 6y ago

The second best thing after print magazines' CD-ROMs... also extinct :-<

obscura 6y ago
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.
Channel 6y ago
I miss brand new, big, hulking Computer Shoppers. It was like a Christmas wish book every month!

ryeguy_24 6y ago

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.

solomonb 6y ago
Me too! I miss the era of the internet that Tucows represents.
- MisterTea 6y ago
  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.
  - meepmorp 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago

degenerate 6y ago

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 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 https://archive.org/details/tucows_71077_Sung_Hi_Lee_2

ars 6y ago
Maybe email them with your findings? They to care about history, maybe they'll be receptive to fixing the issues.
rzzzt 6y ago
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 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.)
- faitswulff 6y ago
  > it was a highly questionable choice to download and run those in their heyday as well I never let that stop me! I was going to have my realistic fish aquarium screensaver, come hell or high water. Besides, I could always reformat. I had that Windows XP serial key memorized, after all!
  - legends2k 6y ago
    That's exactly me, you described there!
ardy42 6y ago
> 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 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tpmx 6y ago

> 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.)

paxys 6y ago
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.
- tpmx 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.)
- stormbrew 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.

jaredsohn 6y ago

Some related obscure nostalgia - I used to like downloading games from Happy Puppy. https://web.archive.org/web/20000815211217/http://www.happypuppy.com/about/ 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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
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.

samsquire 6y ago

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.

arkitaip 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - Marsymars 6y ago
    For Doom, you don’t have to guess! There are half-dozen source ports that are still under active development - some of them have fairly high system requirements in terms of CPU/GPU/RAM for advanced graphical features, but they’re generally much smaller than 2GB in size. e.g. GZDoom is 16 MB, not including the game assets.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The bloat of abstraction is a small price to pay for the deathmarch of progress. When you look at the ever growing chasm that software needs to fill, it all makes sense. Consider how the most modern computer most of us could even write an emulator for is over 40 years old. Abstraction is the only way we have a hope of meeting hardware where it has progressed. Just compare the best game anyone could build with z80 assembly vs. Unreal Engine / Unity. It's easy to pick on a 12MB calculator app, but don't let that rob you of being truly humbled by what can be built today.

wiremine 6y ago

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.

disgrunt 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Ting was sold to DISH in September. They may have kept the ISP part.
  - richardwhiuk 6y ago
    It's a joint venture now apparently.
dimator 6y ago
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.
- artificial 6y ago
  Ah, bookstores! The travesty of consolidation in the last 25 years really cements things. I miss the independent retailers and variety. Kinda makes you think about having total recall and being able to revisit what once was.
Svperstar 6y ago

dceddia 6y ago

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.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Ahh..the sound of dial up and playing connection roulette. I got a fluttery feeling just thinking about it.

d23 6y ago

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.

cecida 6y ago

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.

aurizon 6y ago

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....

therealmarv 6y ago

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 ;)

josh2600 6y ago

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.

TtEdN7jwT 6y ago

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.

soheil 6y ago

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 6y ago
Yeah. Plus you'd have FTP sites that would mirror a variety of sources too. Now Chrome has removed FTP support completely.
- kevincox 6y ago
  > 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.
  - sub7 6y ago
    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.
    - spijdar 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      Gemini says hello!
      - sub7 6y ago

canadianfella 6y ago

12 hour downloads of 7mb Paint Shop Pro trial...

_joel 6y ago

Where will I be able to download my winsock.dll apps now though?

laumars 6y ago

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 6y ago

> 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 6y ago
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 6y ago

[deleted]

throwaway5752 6y ago

"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.

tambourine_man 6y ago

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 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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.
kalleboo 6y ago
> 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.

anthony_barker 6y ago

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.

jbverschoor 6y ago

tucows, jumbo, and x2ftp.oulu.fi were my goto places :-)

IronWolve 6y ago

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.

pjmlp 6y ago

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.

war1025 6y ago

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.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software - wow internet history. I forgot that TUCOWS even stood for that

canada_dry 6y ago
Back from the days when hotmail.com stood for HTML mail.
- ChrisArchitect 6y ago
  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) :)
  - tdeck 6y ago
    I think canada_dry is right. They used to spell it HoTMaiL.
    - einr 6y ago
      Yes, it briefly had this abomination of a logo before adopting a more sensible identity: https://logodix.com/logo/715204.gif https://logodix.com/logo/715204.gif
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        Oh God, the 1990, it hurts.

danans 6y ago

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.

obscura 6y ago

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.

stevekemp 6y ago
For me freshmeat.net was the source of new software around that kinda timeframe. But I did help a few people download browsers, and better FTP clients from tucows. There was a related site, an index of available software, but I can't remember the name. I remember it had an abbreviation, something like "chase" and hosted mostly shareware stuff. But the details elude me.

mdtancsa 6y ago

But where will I download TCPMan and Trumpet Winsock from now???

forgotmypw17 6y ago
That's a great question, retrocomputing enthusiasts better grab what they need for their dream retro installs.

Octopuz 6y ago

I still have my ‘official mirror’ T-shirt from Tucows (1994?)

cosmodisk 6y ago

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!

Slartie 6y ago

first thought: What, Tucows still existed? clicks on link second thought: That's not Tucows! Where is the logo with the two cows???

firecall 6y ago

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 .

nevster 6y ago

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"

hermitcrab 6y ago

I've been selling Windows and Mac software online since 2005, so I remember them well. Tucows and similar sites were quite an important part of selling software online as an Indie back then. But they became less and less relevant as search engines improved. Eventually most of the download sites just became automatically generated online garbage heaps, trying to trick you into downloading things you didn't want, adding dodgy brower toolbar extensions and pushing fake awards ( https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-award... ). In some ways it is good that download sites are less relevant, but we have just swapped one lot of gatekeepers for another (mostly Google and Apple).

Channel 6y ago

Tucows made lots of Macs great! With a Mac, it was sometimes hard to find software. Tucows usually had something for you!

pomian 6y ago

Great memories of using Tucows. It was a dependable source of software. Have a similar feeling using f-droid now. Look for a useful tool, and find something completely different, that is either useful or fun.

gsmethells 6y ago

End of an era. I remember using them consistently in the mid- to late-90’s. Sad to see them go but change is the only constant in life. Goodbye old friend!

kumarvvr 6y ago

Pleasantly surprised to know Tucows is a thriving internet company. Nostalgia overload. I remember downloading so much stuff from tucows.

anonymousiam 6y ago

Tucows is still a domain registry. (See: https://tucowsdomains.com https://tucowsdomains.com) In my experience, they are one of the shadier ones, but maybe they are all bad these days. For example, if a rare domain (E.g. any three-letter .com) is registered with them and about to expire, instead of releasing it as they should, it will be held for auction.

andrew_ 6y ago

Man... I had some of the first freeware programs I developed listed on Tucows. They were crucial to developing a userbase. I had no idea they were still around, and I'm thrilled to see they made it this far. Farewell, old friend!

pupdogg 6y ago

Nostalgia for sure! Tucows was one of the originals for me. Back when AOL was still running on 28.8k...thank you for being a part of my childhood and the start of the internet revolution! Tucows, Lycos, Geocities...wow! Where has time gone?!?!

lathiat 6y ago

Just this week I was trying to find an animated Windows 98 startup screen replacement I used of a borg cube.. couldn't quite find the exact one but found a few linked on tucows and FTP archives of tucows :)

juststeve 6y ago

pour one out for tucows

StavrosK 6y ago

Here it is, for your nostalgic pleasure (try Arizona, it works): https://web.archive.org/web/19970212181139/http://www.tucows.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19970212181139/http://www.tucows... I'm amazed at how many clicks you have to go through to actually see software. No "top 10" list at the start, no "popular", nothing. You have to pick a mirror, which brings you to an almost empty page, click a small "Windows 95" link hidden on the left sidebar, then pick a category, and only then you see the actual software. Odd how much UX leeway you have when you're about the only thing on the web.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Wow!! That’s a blast from the past. Goodbye and Thanks!

moltar 6y ago

That thing was still alive? Wow.