I was chatting with co-Pinger Paul recently about memories of the late-1990s web and Tucows came up. Between Hotfiles and Tucows, all of my shareware and freeware needs were met. Tucows (originally an acronym for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software, a name which has long since been dropped) always had great reviews and rated items with cows (glowing yellow cows, if I remember correctly). Their background featured their logo, which was… wait for it… two cows. When hitting the main site, you’d choose a mirror site close to you and unlike today, where it would at least appear to be hosted on the same site, you were always taken to some random ISP’s mirror of the main Tucows site.
Tucows still exists, but is sucktastic and worthless now (in terms of their original mission, at least). I hope the original founders made out well.
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