tucows
Tucows Inc. or Tucows (originally an acronym for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software, a name which has long since been dropped) was formed in Flint, Michigan, USA in 1993. It incorporated in Pennsylvania and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The company runs a widely used website directory of shareware, freeware, and demo software packages available to download. A system of mirror sites is maintained to allow the traffic to the site to be distributed among several worldwide server locations. Tucows contains software for many major computer platforms including Windows, Linux and Macintosh, and also older versions of Windows (most notably the Windows 3.x series).The Tucows logo is two cows' heads, a play on the homophone "two cows". Additionally, their ratings system uses cow icons.Company historyScott Swedorski started Tucows in 1993 to provide users with downloads of both freeware and trial versions of shareware. Internet Direct, owned and operated by John Nemanic, Bill Campbell, and Colin Campbell, acquired Tucows in 1996. STI Ventures acquired Tucows in 1999.
