"Driver sites" were also obfuscated in layers of ads 20 years ago as it's been a low hanging fruit for a SEO'd topic / malware vector, so you're looking for a needle in a haystack pretty much. The better alternatives were either vendors' own sites or FTPs.

What exactly are you searching for, which drivers? As leileilol already said, the large (non-manufacturer) driver sites were mostly shitty pages 20 or 25 years back then. I'll try to add more drivers to my website, but I never will have all of them there...

kind regards
soggi

It doesn't have to be a site that hosted everything; could be smaller, more specialized sites too. It also doesn't have to be english; from late 90s to early or mid 2000s.

I'm quite sure there were sites (perhaps not well known) that had more or less direct access to the files. I wasn't very active in this area back then so don't remember the names at all.

I'm not looking for one file. Just want to check old websites out in archive.org and see if I could find any interesting drivers.

Then you have to look for archived manufacturer websites, they often have direct links. You can also crawl through archived FTPs. There are thousands of possibilities. But the large driver pages which wanted to cover all manufacturers were always crappy as said above.

I have a big and still growing list of mostly old (archived) manufacturer/contributor/developer/publisher URLs...maybe one day they make it to my website...but until then I just can recommend to be more specific as I won't post the whole list with hundreds to thousands of entries here!

In between you may also have a look at my website's driver section (-> https://soggi.org/drivers/drivers.htm) where I have collected some of the latest drivers for several pieces of hardware.

kind regards
soggi

I've already been looking in archived first-party sites, and they do not always have the files archived, or force the user to go through a search box or selection menu, which usually doesn't work.

I'm just looking for any old non-official sites that hosted video, audio, storage, etc. drivers, that match the posted criteria. It doesn't have to be all of them in one location. It could be a small, community made site too, like yours.

I'm not looking for any specific file.

eddman wrote on 2024-12-17, 08:24:

I've already been looking in archived first-party sites, and they do not always have the files archived, or force the user to go through a search box or selection menu, which usually doesn't work.

I'm just looking for any old non-official sites that hosted video, audio, storage, etc. drivers, that match the posted criteria. It doesn't have to be all of them in one location. It could be a small, community made site too, like yours.

I'm not looking for any specific file.

Here is something that I think is what you're looking for https://web.archive.org/web/20000621143458/ht … ware_index.html

I had a look at my list and the "good old" Vobis actually was the only really working "non-official sites" URL with simple/direct DL links there. OK, I'm more focused directly on the manufacturers, but that's the way it is.

Some OT:
I recall visiting in the Vobis shop with a good friend on a ~regular basis in the very early 2000s, it felt like it has been reduced in size every time we were there...until it was closed after a few years. We bought two Alpha CPUs for ~50,- DM and I sold them for ~250,- DM on ebay, the rest was quite expensive and we never bought something else.

kind regards
soggi