26,045
3. Beginning in the first quarter of 2020, portfolio revenue consisted of individual sales from Tucows’ surname portfolio following the sale of the Company’s remaining domain name portfolio in the fourth quarter of 2019.
“The fourth quarter was a solid finish to a very good year for Tucows,” said Elliot Noss, President and Chief Executive Officer, Tucows Inc. “Revenue and gross margin from our Domains and Ting Internet businesses, excluding the impact of large bulk domains sales from our Domains Portfolio in prior year periods, increased 6% and 13% year over year, respectively, for the fourth quarter, and for all of 2020 were up 5% and 13%.”
You probably remember it as Tucows.com, an essential source of shareware downloads for the early Web Share
One of the web’s early software download bazaars, Tucows.com, has closed.
Originally named “The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software” and launched in 1993, the site came along just as the web erupted into the public imagination and as shareware became a popular tactic for software distribution and marketing. Initially running from a single PC in a library, the site’s thousands of downloads were accessible without n00b-intimidating FTP tools.
As web publishing became easier and search engines made it easier to find software from its source, the site’s utility declined. But for a good few years Tucows was a reliable source of the myriad utilities needed to access and use the early web, or to help stabilise a Windows 95 PC.
Once upon a time, in the early 1980s to be exact, you could pay hundreds of dollars for a PC program, or you could download a shareware program at the shocking high speed of 1200 bits per second (BPS). You d then try the program, and if you liked it, could buy it for a fraction of the price of a commercial program. Then along came the web, and we could download programs at breathtaking speeds from 28.-33.6 kilobytes per second (Kbps). It was then, as programs grew from kilobites to megabites in size, that some thought a library of freeware and shareware programs on the web would be a great idea.
Tucows Downloads Closes Down After Almost Three Decades of Catering Safe Software Download
Photo : Screenshot from Tucows Official YouTube Channel
Tucows has announced that it has shut down its software download site, famously known as the Tucows Downloads after nearly three decades of being a popular and established download website.
Engadget has reported that the CEO of Tucows himself, Elliot Noss, made the announcement, wherein he mentioned and described the website as an old one. He also added that such old sites are experiencing maintenance challenges, which could result into a risk on keeping it up to date.
The Fall of Tucows Downloads