[errcorrectcode]

You're telling me. I'm into vintage / retro PCs and use IA to find drivers, manuals, and so forth. There are some manufacturers who have gone out of business and aren't completely captured by IA. Some of the worst offenders obscured their downloads behind "CGI scripts" (indirect links requiring server-side code) rather than direct downloads. Organized, searchable, and comprehensive museum/archiving of digital artifacts in one place is necessary to avoid bitrot and linkrot. Schematics and bill of materials (BOMs) are necessary to repair, recreate, and/or simulate vintage hardware.

If I can't find hardware jumper information anywhere, some older cards are simple enough that knowing ISA or PCI bus pinouts, searching Octopart for datasheets, combined with a quality DMM can be used to painstakingly trace and determine functionality.

The other component necessary is the human brain-dump knowledge (wiki perhaps) of "what does what" to make sense of it.

The "let's delete everything old because old doesn't matter" mindset is how we lose past works forever. (If anyone can find "Mouse Commander", an independently-published TSR utility for Welltris to add mouse control, you'd be my BFF.)

PS: Interestingly, Matrox and the acquirer of Adaptec (Microchip) still have many drivers available. NVIDIA is also okay, but sometimes needs IA to get the last supported version of a particular driver.

[enriquto]

What's "IA" ? (For me it's "Intelligence Artificielle", but what you say does not make too much sense. Do you have a super-fancy way to search for drivers?).

[detaro]

Internet Archive (https://archive.org)