After 28 Years, Tucows Finally Closes Its Downloads Site

"We have made the difficult decision to retire the Tucows Downloads site," writes CEO Elliot Noss in a blog post at Tucows.com/retired: 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 shareware downloads bulletin board system (BBS) that would become Tucows Downloads was founded back in 1993 on a library computer in Flint, MI. What started as a place for people in the know to download software became the place to download software on the burgeoning Internet. Far more quickly than anyone could have imagined.

A lot has changed since those early years. Tucows has grown and evolved as a business. It's been a long time since Tucows has been TUCOWS, which stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.

Today, Tucows is the second-largest domain name registrar in the world behind Go Daddy and the largest wholesaler of domain names in the world with customers like Shopify and other global website builder platforms. Hover offers domain names and email at retail to help people brand their life online. OpenSRS (and along the way our acquisitions of Enom, Ascio and EPAG) are the SaaS platforms upon which tens of thousands of customers have built their own domain registration businesses, registering tens of millions of domains on behalf of their customers. Ting Internet is building fiber-optic networks all over the U.S. At the same time, we're building the Mobile Services Enabler SaaS platform that is powering DISH's entry into the US mobile market.

Point is, we're keeping busy.

For the past several years, history, well sentimentality, has been the only reason to keep Tucows Downloads around. We talked about shutting the site down before. Most seriously in 2016 when instead, we decided to go ad-free, keeping the site up as a public service.

Today is different. Tucows Downloads is old. 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.

Tucows Downloads has had an incredible run. Retiring it is the right move but that doesn't alter the fact that it will always hold a special place in hearts and our story. We're thankful to the thousands of software developers who used Tucows Downloads to get their software in front of millions of people, driving billions of downloads over more than 25 years.

Thank you.

Ooh, that's a tough hit.

[h33t l4x0r]

Now where am I going to download the latest mosaic browser?

Re:

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Try http://sillydog.org/narchive/ [sillydog.org].

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Try Chocolatey. It's a package manager for Windows. Safer and easier.

Re:Ooh, that's a tough hit.

[Vintermann]

Clearly no good, see for yourself [chocolatey.org]!

(Seriously, I think you missed a joke, and also seriously, Chocolatey is really nice.)

Re:Ooh, that's a tough hit.

[Inglix the Mad]

I get the jest, but I remember when it was the only site to find drivers for hardware whose manufacturer went *poof* in the night. For a while I had a lot of small business clients, and small business clients tend to buy "bargain" hardware because that's what they can afford. I salute the Tucows team, at the time, for not bundling spyware (or other bullshiat) in with every download.

However the time of the site has passed. Go gently into the night.

Re:

[quenda]

Now where am I going to download the latest mosaic browser?

From your ISP's FTP server, I guess?

--
"Finger me for my public key"

Re:

[werthe]

http://www.mcom.com/ [mcom.com] Mosaic Communications

Re:

[Strider-]

Can you tell me where to find it in Gopherspace, or do I need Archie or Veronica to find it?

Just when I thought I couldn't feel any older...

[Hagaric]

this happens.

A shame they couldn't have given it a week so we could have one nostalgic last browse..

Re: Internet Archive sucking up all the old sites

[BAReFO0t]

You could mirror them. Got any Petabytes or whatever? Or just here to bitch?

Re: Internet Archive sucking up all the old sites

[MrNaz]

Most of those independent reference sites now just maintain the pages on Wikipedia that pertain to their areas of interest. They can focus on content rather than the technical work of keeping a platform running.

It's a good thing.

The olden days

[Dan East]

There was a time when I had the #1 download on Tucows Pocket PC for a number of years straight. It was Pocket Quake [slashdot.org] and then later, Pocket Quake 2 [slashdot.org]. One or both exceeded a million downloads, which was a lot back then.

Just noticed that the 20th anniversary of that Slashdot post was 4 days ago. Time flies.

Re:

[azcoyote]

Ha, nice. I remember PocketPC. My Dell Axim was amazing way back when.

Re:

[jryland]

Wow, I remember porting your port of Quake to QPE. I recognize your name too, this brings back memories or iPAQs and Zauruses. I still remember seeing all the code you must have hand converted to fixed point from the original quake code. That would have been quite a bit of work.

Re:

[mobby_6kl]

Thank you for your service! Used to play both on my Asus A600 PocketPC, pretty amazing what those little things could do back then.

Re:Never heard of it.

[Cederic]

Used to be. You wouldn't even bother search the web for a download, you'd search tucows.

Then they started adding more and more adverts, then they started tainting the downloads themselves, so people moved onto less damaged sources. The search engines had also improved by then, and even small developers were putting up websites to download their software.

Then of course, the app stores came along, and took tucows mobile market.

So they sabotaged their own service just as competitors stepped up to take their traffic. Haven't been there in over a decade.

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

Ask your parents. They will tell you stories.

Re: Never heard of it.

[MrNaz]

Ok boo... Err... Kiddie.

Elliot Noss, head of "The Untoucowables" ?

[poptopdrop]

... and his incorruptible downloads.

Anyone ever use this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I was using Windows (95-2001) I would always download right from the creator. These download sites started putting their own wrappers on each download and users would upload sketchy versions of software on different sites. I was always wary of getting software through third parties.

Re: Anyone ever use this?

[BAReFO0t]

Well, the point was that Tucows didn't do any of that bullshit. A simple, honest site, grown naturally out of necessities instead of profit, by geeks for geeks.
At least in my memories.

Re:

[mysticgoat]

Yep, I used tucows quite a bit from about 1995 to 2005. At first because it was one of the few places to to find useful things, like calculators that did more than basic arithmetic, text editors with regular expressions, etc. Then later because I could trust that anything that had been on the site for a few months was a safe download. By 2008 I had finally fully broken free of Windows and was using Linux and the Debian repositories.

Gosh, ain't Xubuntu wonderful!

Tucows, Gateway cow boxen, SSSD 5.25 in flop

You have two cows

[e3m4n]

You sell off one cow to maintain the other cow. The second cow keeps producing corrupted milk.

Re:

[Darinbob]

Two cows walk into a vegan bar. The owner says "hey, we don't serve your kind here!"

That crazy

[Revek]

Its only been twenty years since I used that side they are already out of business.

RIP

[vbdasc]

to the most comprehensive collection of Gopher clients for W*ndows ever.

Gopher

[Dareth]

Gopher: Best internet protocol for recipes ever invented.

Re:

[Darinbob]

Gopher is the fruit of the prairie. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. There's gopher kebobs, gopher creole, gopher gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple gopher, lemon gopher, coconut gopher, pepper gopher, gopher soup, gopher stew, gopher salad, gopher and potatoes, gopher burger, gopher sandwich. That... that's about all the gopher recipes there is Oh, and gopher with two cows.

Re:

[Dareth]

I think TuCows stopped delivering/downloading Gopher.

Re:

[Revek]

Thats slightly ironic. I have a complete copy of the gopher archive around here on an old drive. Its 47 gig compressed.

Re:

[xanthos]

Then you may be interested in the gopher community (gopher://gopher.club) [gopher.club] over at sdf.org [sdf.org]

(Yes, the original Internet still exists outside of FAANG, you just need to know where to look for it)

I have fond memories of Tucows

[thegarbz]

We all had good ties at those parties, you know how it went:
1. Drink a shot
2. Open up Tucows
3. Try to download software by guessing which download button on the page is the legitimate one.
4. Anyone who hits the spam link gets knocked out. The people who end up with a download running, Go to Step 1.

Keep going until a winner is declared.

I remember one such party was a disappointment as everyone got knocked out in round one.

Ahh, the memories

[TheChief]

The central Ohio dial-up ISP I was working at 97-07 was a TUCOWS mirror and I recall making cd images of their content for our members on request in the late 90s. Waiting 35+ minutes for a 2x burnt disc to fail was always pleasant. An end of an era for sure..

Already dead

[DaFallus]

To most people, Tucows has been dead since the 90s. After eventually bundling downloads with spy and adware, they turned to domain squatting for the majority of their profits.

Good memories

[tflf]

It's time, and past, but, I'm sad to see it go. Back in the day, TUCOWS was my primary on-line resource for software, especially freeware and shareware, and, when the manufacturer failed, drivers. TUCOWS made Windows 3.1 and 95 computing a lot easier for me.
 

Re:

[Darinbob]

Tucows was my favorite rapper too.

TUCOWS was Awesome ...

[RitchCraft]

... for while, then they, like many other download sites, started creating fake download links (had to guess which one was the ACTUAL file download) and wrapping downloads with malware. I had a run-in with TUCOWS around 2005 or so when they bought RealNames. Before that I had an email address with [e-mail]. TUCOWS bought the site and jacked the prices WAY up. TUCOWS was awesome in the 90's ... not so much after.

Notes from a TUCOWS veteran.

[Yaztromo]

So back in the 90's I worked as a software developer for Internet Direct in Toronto, which bought TUCOWS somewhere in the middle of the decade. I put together the OS/2 version of TUCOWS (although I was the second person to work on it -- the first, NS, was let go prior to my involvement with the site).

Interesting bit of TUCOWS trivia: at one point, Gateway Computer sent a cease-and-desist order on TUCOWS using a cow-spotted background on their website, claiming it would cause "confusion" to consumers. I remember John N, the then-CEO, laughing his ass off over it. We never replied, and they never had the guts to take any actual action (it was purely an intimidation tactic. It's worth nothing the guys who started Internet Direct previously ran a software rental business that had been sued by Microsoft -- and Microsoft lost. At least in court -- ultimately, they petitioned the government of the day to amend the legislation to make software rentals illegal, and the three of them pivoted to growing the MajorBBS they ran in their store basement, and then to becoming an ISP when that avenue opened to them).

The TUCOWS OS/2 section -- like OS/2 -- ultimately didn't last all that long. It never gained a lot of traction with the OS/2 community (Hobbes was better known there), and the traffic was minuscule compared to Windows, and thus it wasn't well invested in and wasn't really kept up-to-date. But it was fun while it lasted.

Yaz

Did they sell Tucows?

[Culture20]

Do they now have magic beans?

Re:

[Forty Two Tenfold]

No, but I think I saw your penguin here [slashdot.org].

Re:

[Culture20]

You, sir or madam, are a gentlebeing and a scholar.

Tucows + Happy Puppy

[EmoryM]

I downloaded many Windows 3.1 programs from Tucows. Thanks for that.

Darn where will I get the latest Lime Wire .....

[big-giant-head]

Not to mention trumpet winsock for my win 3 dial up modem! whatever shall I do?