Create accountLogin

Recent searches

No recent searches

Search options

Only available when logged in.
toot.wales is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
We are the Open Social network for Wales and the Welsh, at home and abroad! Y rhwydwaith cymdeithasol annibynnol i Gymru, wedi'i bweru gan Mastodon!

Administered by:

Server stats:

643
active users

toot.wales: AboutStatusProfiles directoryPrivacy policy

Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.3.7

Public
vga256

thanks to @MossRC’s exceptional book Shareware Heroes, TIL that TUCOWS stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.

Its earliest incarnation began in 1991 when founder Scott Swedorski, then a recent college graduate, took a job at a library consortium as a system administrator for an initiative called FALCON (Flint Area Library Cooperative Online Network). 'At the time people started hearing more and more about getting online, he recalls, 'but there was no simple way to do it unless you wanted to use something like AOL or Prodigy.' Swedorski wanted to help library patrons navigate what the online world had to offer, and so he came up with a simple one-page document. 'It highlighted some applications with instructions on how to install and use them,' he says. But quickly the document expanded to two pages, then three, then four, and so on, and in his spare time Swedorski decided to teach himself HTML and turn it into a website. He called it The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software - referencing its focus on Windows networking software. Fans called it UCOWS or TUCOWS for short (in September 1995 it would officially become TUCOWS after the purchase of a tucows.com domain name).
#webPreservation#worldWideWeb#retroComputing
ExploreLive feeds
About