ZDNet Downloads

» see downloads.zdnet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I downloaded from this one. Not by name, and not on purpose, which is how most people used it. In the years when a piece of software arrived as a file you had to go and find, there were maybe four places worth checking, and the ZDNet library was one of them.

It opened in 1996 at hotfiles.com, under a masthead that read SOFTWARE LIBRARY in block capitals with a red ZDNet block wedged into the first word, and a tagline running off to the right: top rated shareware picked by people you trust. Over ten thousand files, every one of them carrying a five-star rating and a file-of-the-day slot to be won. Ziff-Davis was a magazine company and it ran the library the way it ran a magazine, with editors who actually opened the programs and wrote a paragraph about each one.

On a 33.6k line that paragraph mattered more than the file did. A four megabyte download was half an hour of holding the phone line, and if the thing turned out to be nag-ware or a crippled demo, you had spent the evening. Somebody having tried it first was the entire value of the site. The rating was not decoration, it was a purchasing decision made on your behalf by a person with a faster connection.

~ the record ~

~ three addresses, one library ~

By December 1998 hotfiles.com had stopped serving its own pages and was bouncing everything to zdnet.com/swlib, the library having been pulled into the main ZDNet site. That redirect kept working for years after anyone had a reason to type the old name.

Then CNET bought ZDNet in 2000 and the two biggest shareware catalogs on the English-language web ended up under one roof. Download.com was the flagship. The ZDNet library carried on with its own address, downloads.zdnet.com, which went up around 2006 and served CNET's images off the com.com domains for the rest of its life. It was the same catalog wearing a different masthead, which is a cheap thing to run and an easy thing to forget about.

~ 410, not 404 ~

The last working version of the page is captured on 8 March 2022, still listing software next to ZDNet news headlines. Nineteen days later the same URL returns a two-line nginx error page. The number on it is 410, which in HTTP terms means the resource is gone deliberately and is not coming back, as distinct from 404, which only means it is not here right now.

Nobody wrote an announcement. Red Ventures had bought the ZDNet brand and was running it as a technology news publication, and a file archive from the shareware era is dead weight on a business like that. Somebody made a decision about a subdomain, and the correct status code got chosen for it. Twenty-six years of catalog, closed with the most accurate header in the specification.

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