Today, Tucows is the second-largest domain name registrar in the world behind Go Daddy and the largest wholesaler of domain names in the world with customers like Shopify and other global website builder platforms. It’s been a long time since Tucows has been TUCOWS, which stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software. Tucows has grown and evolved as a business. Far more quickly than anyone could have imagined.Ī lot has changed since those early years. What started as a place for people in the know to download software became the place to download software on the burgeoning Internet. The shareware downloads bulletin board system (BBS) that would become Tucows Downloads was founded back in 1993 on a library computer in Flint, MI. 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. We have made the difficult decision to retire the Tucows Downloads site.