The Internet Archive is invaluable when working with old hardware or software when you need to go look at old version of a website to find manuals, drivers, or general info. Unfortunately a great number of files lived on FTP servers because the web wasn’t really up to hosting them in the 1990s, and many of the web crawlers did not archive the contents of FTP servers. I frequently run into cases where an archive URL will link to a ftp:// URL to a long defunct FTP server and that’s usually a dead end. This usually leads to a lot of very crafty Google searches to try to find the filename that was linked. Mayyyybe there was somebody else out there that mirrored all or part of the FTP site and their index is discoverable on the web.
Sometimes the FTP server is gone, but the present day web servers still have the files somewhere. This is the case for US Robotics I’ve found when I need to look at old Courier or I-modem drivers and firmware that were only on ftp.usr.com, with a little fishing the old files are still there on the support.usr.com website. (If somebody from USR is reading this, please please don’t delete these in the sake of preservation, even better make them more discoverable somehow).
For example, a copy the Courier ISDN Modem file library index and descriptions can be found on archive.org at: https://web.archive.org/web/20001002222652/http://consumer.3com.com/courieri/filelibrary/index.html
Links to say, the Courier I-Modem internal firmware links to this ftp://consumerftp.3com.com url which was not archived.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001002222652/ftp://consumerftp.3com.com/usr/dl14/ie020104.zip
Or the V.90 flash ROM code for the Courier V.Everything 25 MHz:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000823182315/ftp://consumerftp.3com.com/usr/dl05/usrxmd25.zip
However note the usr/dl14 and usr/dl05 part of the URL. These file areas are still available on the support.usr.com website today:
https://support.usr.com/support/usr/dl05/usrxmd25.zip
Take the old file area path such as usr/dl05, and append it to https://support.usr.com/support/. The majority of the time you’ll be able to get the old file. There’s no index that I’m aware of that shows all the files available, so you’ll need to find the download area directory name and filename from some other method such as archive.org or old file listings.
I figured this out recently when spending a bunch of time combing over the old and new support websites for manuals. Neat, huh?
Also shout out to Logitech for still running an FTP server at ftp.logitech.com. Want drivers for your old 1996 Quickcam eyeball camera? They’re there!
