[tambourine_man]

Tucows and, the more Mac focused, Version Tracker, where a huge part of the early Web.

Besides finding new stuff (which was awesome), in those days you had to manually check in those sites to see if there were new versions of your apps. I'd be very surprised if you told me back then that we're all OK with apps calling home to check for updates regularly.

[dmurray]

> I'd be very surprised if you told me back then that we're all OK with apps calling home to check for updates regularly.

I think we'd have thought of that as a great development. "In the future, you'll automatically get bug fixes and new features in your programs as they're released." What's not to like? After all, you already trust the developer (the programs were not typically open source).

The justified distrust we have now for software vendors shipping "features" that benefit them rather than us came much later.

[tambourine_man]

Trust changes. Software owners do as well. It was also common back in the day to keep running old versions of your apps for whatever reason. It’s much harder and sometimes not possible these days.

[kalleboo]

> I'd be very surprised if you told me back then that we're all OK with apps calling home to check for updates regularly

I'd have been fine with it from a user control/privacy perspectie (this was back in the day when people were fine downloading and running random shareware with zero sandboxing or memory protection whatsoever), but we didn't have the bandwidth or memory to do it.

With a modem you were almost never online. You maybe went online for an hour or two in the evening. If everything started updating as soon as you dialed up your 28.8k modem, you'd never get anything done. And with the tiny RAM sizes and poor multitasking of those old OSes, background update daemons and such were out of the question.