The Internet Wayback Machine is a set of systems which have been archiving various web pages since about 1996. It’s fun to see how styles and technology has changed, but even more so, sites who did not properly configure their /robots.txt often have some rather hilareous things popping up from ages past (I have also played a bit part within this horror.)

Today, I was lucky enough to obtain a driver for a device for a company who no longer exists – Raite, a Taiwan company, closed in ‘02, if memory serves. I have an old Raite RDR-108H 8x DVD which gives me a few fits here and there, but generally works OK. I was searching for an issue regarding quirkiness with DMA, to no avail.

I found several people begging for DOS drivers for this drive, since Raite no longer exists, and it seems virtually impossible (as people claimed) on driver boards to obtain them.

I popped up the wayback machine, went to Raite’s Archive, skimmed through everything, found that they hosted their drivers on the web, never setup their ‘robots.txt’... and given a few minutes, had them on my local disk.

If you need DOS/Win9x drivers for your old Raite drive, here is where you’ll find them. ;)