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

> 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/

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

They did sell their Ting Mobile division to DISH the other month though, so some retrenching has apparently been in order.

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...

Adding windows defender by default has gone a LONG ways in fixing windows.

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.

Back in the XP days it was a veneer on GIANT AntiSpyware which as I recall was viewed as a separate component to anti-virus back then. As things evolved you saw combined firewall/anti-spyware/virus/adware from companies like Norton/Symantec and as you note MSE was really MS's anti-virus entry in Vista & 7.

Nowadays 'anti-virus' subsumes all those products into one unified thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Defender#Beta

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

Oh wow, GetRight... I don't know if it's just nostalgia, but the UI of those apps was much better than today's UI. Back then everything had a standard UI and you could count on menus and elements being Alt-accessible, nowadays everything is a hodgepodge of web apps and nothing works the same way as anything else.

And to add to it, it seems that none of them hear of keyboard shortcuts.

That is the worst offender. Keyboard is the best way of quickly navigating, but no, no keyboard shortcuts anywhere any more, and definitely no underlines on buttons so you can alt+key to them...

Almost shellshocked from reading the name GetRight. Jesus that feels long ago.

As an Australia I still long for the multi-stream download of GetRight. I regularly use axel (or aria2c) to just get my connection to 100Mbit.

Holy heck that’s a blast from the 56k past.

I was on a 28.8, after pitching my parents for weeks about the benefits of keeping the telephone busy for 2 hours per day...

Same, download manager used to be a must-have app in the early internet days.

This hurts. You Remember getright aeons ago and I still remember JetCar ( the products name before that)

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

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.

ftp.cdrom.com was the fastest slackware mirror for me for all of my teen years.

this reminds me of poking around on my ISP's shell server to find warez drops other people had put there.

... now I can smell magic: the gathering cards for some reason.

whoops, gg guys, dinner's ready

+++ATH

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.

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

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

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

Memories!

There was a time where you could replace “www” for “ftp” and in most occasions there would be a file listing!

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.

I downloaded many Doom WADs from ftp.cdrom.com

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".

Same!! So many fond memories of the early web. I miss what was that "new frontier" feeling.

How do we get that feeling again? Where is the newness today? I miss that feeling so much.

We need to decentralize things a bit to get that old internet smell back.

Agreed. Everything feels over-saturated.

NFTs?

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.

I register my domains through hover.com to support Tucows. It happens to be an excellent registrar.

>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

That's sad, I was just thinking last week that I wish Tucows were still around so search for new interesting tools. I thought it was taken down ages ago.

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?

They've been hosting downloads since 1993. That's more than two decades, and certainly a couple of lifetimes ago for me :)

Speaking of nostalgia, I remember downloading Trumpet Winsock from Tucows way back when....

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

+1 (different age range, same idea)

So say we all