TUCOWS downloads shut down

A bit of domains in this one too, as TUCOWS is still running OpenSRS, the wholesale domain registrar, where I learned a lot of about the industry and made some great friends. The company is headquartered in Toronto.

I remember all the meetings when I worked at Tucows / OpenSRS, explaining what the name stood for, The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software. Many of the partners had fond memories of "the original app store" back then, and so did I. I joined Tucows coming from one of the many companies that hosted a mirror of the site. Rest in Peace, Tucows Downloads. Without you, I probably wouldn't be here today.

https://tucows.com/retired/

Elliot Noss said:

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.

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Photo taken by Frank Michlick, 2019-05-22

Yup, I remember downloading all the shareware, I was like a giddy schoolboy in a candy store.

I go back as far as Domain Direct who probably had the best interface I ever saw in the industry. Tucows closed them down and changed to Hover which was a google like interface that stripped out the majority of the usefulness from Domain Direct.

That said I stayed with Hover and and with the help of the Manager there we wrote some scripts and I purchased every available LLCanada.ca and LLCanada.com

Over the years I sold a ton of those and dropped the ones I did not need. After that we did the same thing and registered every MapleWord.ca and MapleWord.com I could get my hands on.

Eventually I had to leave Hover because they charged in USD and that got expensive so I switched to Canspace.ca and they were really well priced on .ca but sucked on .com pricing. I put up with that but eventually moved to GoDaddy because of their bulk tools and domainer acceptance.

So you see, I too have a long history going back to year 2000 with Tucows.

MapleDots said:

That said I stayed with Hover and and with the help of the Manager there we wrote some scripts and I purchased every available LLCanada.ca and LLCanada.com

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About when was that? Curious who this was on the Hover side at the time

[notify]FM[/notify]

Ross Rader was his name, him and I worked well together back then.

Being around for the start of the Internet was a real blast, and I can still remember going over to a friend's house and seeing him playing Wolfenstein on his PC. What-the-hell-is-that? BAM! That was a seminal moment in my life.

Cue me rushing to the store, buying a copy of PC Buyer/Computer Shopper (anyone remember those massive tomes?), convincing my parents it would help my in school, then ordering a MB + 486SX processor (cue "it's SX cuz it sucks!") et al. (I bought my friend's old color monitor and was given a case) and later making my first PC.

I think it only cost me $500 total and played everything at the time. Damn, I was cheap even back then.

MapleDots said:

[notify]FM[/notify]

Ross Rader was his name, him and I worked well together back then.

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Oh right, I forgot Ross ran DomainDirect at first. Wow, blast from the past.