[tpmx]

> 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 usage of the word "much" makes it seem like IA crawled most of the archive, "probably".

@ Elliot Noss:

The real classy way to shut down something as historically important as this would be to transfer a 100% (edit: ~100%) dump to the IA.

(Hoping to be disproved.)

[codazoda]

Alas, my app listing for ButtonWiz is gone (maybe I removed it years ago). It was listed in Windows Magazine as one of the top 10 shareware programs sometime around 1998.

That makes it sound bigger than it was, the Top 10 list was a small 1/4 page article that appeared in a bunch of issues.

[janfoeh]

Has your app been around for longer than '98? The screenshots I've found look familiar.

If it was available around, say, '94 or '95, I am almost positive I had it installed at the time I started messing around with the Compuserve Homepage Builder...

[codazoda]

Yes, I developed it for nearly a decade starting around 1994.

[jayzalowitz]

Speaking as a person who faced this, licensing concerns are probably driving the mostiness.

[tpmx]

Sure - I'd just like to make sure. So much early content has been deleted from history for no reason at all, really. If there's been a serious effort to save at least the early content from the 1990s I'd be super happy. If everything minus problematic content has been saved, I'd be even happier.

[kalleboo]

Jason Scott of the Internet Archive seems to have said they were offered the data https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1352523064874053632

[kalleboo]

Longer statement https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1352765779410825217?s=2...

[tpmx]

Fantastic!

[paxys]

Sites like this have a long tail problem. Yes doing a 100% dump would be best, but 90% of it is likely stuff that hasn't been accessed in years and never will again. So from a resourcing point of view it is better to save "most" than none at all.

[stormbrew]

And yet, all is still better than most. The IA's entire point of existence is to preserve that long tail stuff that doesn't get preserved otherwise, and they certainly currently hold on to things that are far less useful than literally anything on tucows was (for eg. a website I worked on in 1995 that probably only had a few hundred visitors even then).

I hope this is just soft wording.

[tpmx]

> I hope this is just soft wording.

Yeah, I hope that too. Maybe everything except 0.01% really problematic content has been transferred to the IA.

[tpmx]

I guess I'm mostly concerned about an authoritative dump from those first years until 1996/1997 or so, probably less than 1 GB.

[cbhl]

I wonder if someone still has a copy of the Tucows CD-ROMs from those days? (Since most folks were still on dial-up and everything.)