Getting drivers for old hardware is harder than ever

You’ve never lived until you’ve had to download a driver from an archived forum post on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

You have no idea if it’s going to work, but it’s your only option. So you bite the bullet. I recently did this with a PCI-based SATA card I was attempting to flash to support a PowerPC-based Mac, and while it was a bit of a leap of faith, it actually ended up working. Score one for chance.

But this, increasingly, feels like it may be a way of life for people trying to keep old hardware alive—despite the fact that all the drivers generally have to do is simply sit on the internet, available when they’re necessary.

This problem is only going to get worse as time progresses. We’ll have to hope random people on the internet are kind enough to upload any drivers they’ve collected and held on to over the years, so users of classic hardware can keep them running.

17 Comments

  1. 2019-12-13 9:08 am
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