Grzyb wrote on 2020-10-23, 11:18:
Software that was common in the era when computers were already ubiquitous consumer products just can't be rare.
You're right. Normally not, no. Though it was very time consuming and tricky to track down older Win32s compatible versions of popular software.
I experienced this myself when I started tracking down early emulators.
Either the homepage was gone, the wayback machine had kept a copy of the homepage iself, but the site used an external server for the zip file - which was not saved, of course.
In the end, you get several dozen sites that all seemingly offer a copy to download, but if yoz try, they redirect to this very same, dead URL.
What you then can do is experimenting.
Change extensions from ZIP to RAR, LZH, LHA, 7Z and hope for a hit when using search engines.
Or you can try altering the file names of newer, available files. foo73b.zip (v7.3b) becomes foo20.zip (v2.0), for example. Or foo20w32.zip, foo20_win32.zip etc.
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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
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