Old Intel drivers and BIOS files going away soon

Because the person honorably maintaining them all these years is finally retiring. No need to hire, much less pay, anyone to maintain a bunch of dusty old junk only a handful of crazies care about.

(I'm joking of course, but what irony if true)

If Intel were with the times, they'd open source that stuff and let the community maintain it. But I'm sure someone higher up at Intel is all like "Hell, no. That's proprietary knowledge. Our secrets must stay secret!"
 
I wonder if the reasons are technical. Could any of this be related to their recent security track record? Maybe they don't want to start suddenly start actively supporting old stuff. Anyway, I see a photo of Raja. How come Intel has all this money, fabs, and people, yet can't do GPUs. Is it about patents?
 
OpenSource said:
I'd imagine some data hoarders from Reddit are already archiving all of this.
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You would be correct. There's a thread about it. Someone already archived it. 342GB worth.

I removed my link to the thread, because the forum kept converting it to a huge media preview (and not sure if linking to it counts as linking to copyrighted materials, etc etc- trying to be careful re: forum rules)
 
M76 said:
But WHY? It's not like it takes that much bandwidth. What traffic does this generate? 1 download / 3 months?
It also must need at least 10gigs, and I'm being generous there, drivers in the 90s and early 00s were barely hitting 5MB.
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How else would they force users to buy new shit? :p

In general I'm pretty meh about drivers for legacy operating systems which have been EOL for years and are generally very inadvisable to use at all. BIOS downloads on the other hand. Those should be distributed permanently.
 
Hmm.. well I do still have an old netware server I haven't powered on in 20 years... wouldn't hurt to have updated nic drivers for that, maybe for win3.1 and DOS in case I want to build a retro game pc. I think I already got those old nic drivers at least. Most haven't been updated in years anyway, except that DOS one.

But yeah, its 342Gb of stuff. That's nothing, don't see why they can't keep hosting it.

Edit: Article says its for old intel motherboards, drivers and bios. So not as worried since I don't own those. Still think it wouldn't hurt to keep it around for awhile though.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
How else would they force users to buy new shit? :p

In general I'm pretty meh about drivers for legacy operating systems which have been EOL for years and are generally very inadvisable to use at all. BIOS downloads on the other hand. Those should be distributed permanently.
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We are talking about vintage hardware here that probably doesn't even have drivers for modern systems. Hosting them would show that they care, and cost them next to nothing. If it makes them feel better they can put up warnings that these downloads are without support and warranty and only used at your own peril. It's not like anyone wants to use a 90s computer to browse the net.
 
Probably means they have a huge web redesign in the works and they don't want to pay to have all that old data entered into the new sites. I mean at some point you just have to pull the plug on it and they know that "concirned citizens" will take care of archiving it for them for the dozen or so people world wide that may need them.
 
M76 said:
We are talking about vintage hardware here that probably doesn't even have drivers for modern systems. Hosting them would show that they care, and cost them next to nothing. If it makes them feel better they can put up warnings that these downloads are without support and warranty and only used at your own peril. It's not like anyone wants to use a 90s computer to browse the net.
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I was thinking more from the perpective of "that old system in the corner that has been running its little server for 20 years and still works, so why replace it?"
 
I don't see this being an issue for many people but it also doesn't seem like much of a burden for them to continue offering them. If they're redoing things and don't want to work in the old stuff they could simply offer a link to a basic legacy repository.

I think I've still got an old 440bx MB that's likely on the list but it will probably go out with the next round of old parts.
 
dgz said:
I wonder if the reasons are technical. Could any of this be related to their recent security track record?
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I was thinking this. They basically found a vulnerability in most of their drivers. Probably don't want someone finding more vulnerabilities from legacy drivers... I'm sure it's a waste of an expense too to keep hosting. It's not just storage and hosting. Company like Intel would be paying $$$ for cdn, waf, bot protection. It adds up.
 
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dgz said:
I wonder if the reasons are technical. Could any of this be related to their recent security track record? Maybe they don't want to start suddenly start actively supporting old stuff.
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Pretty much this, and since Meltdown and Spectre affect all of their x86 microarchitectures back to 1995 with the Pentium Pro, this isn't too surprising.
Just another nail in their proverbial coffin.

Everything up until 2014
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
I was thinking more from the perpective of "that old system in the corner that has been running its little server for 20 years and still works, so why replace it?"
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I don't buy that. If it works it never gets touched, so it won't need any drivers. If it stops working it is no longer "still works" so it's getting a replacement anyway.
 
Nothing goes away on the internet that is hardware related. Many geeks of all kinds will have these stored somewhere.

They just wont be on Intel's servers.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I was thinking more from the perpective of "that old system in the corner that has been running its little server for 20 years and still works, so why replace it?"
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Try standalone equipment with proprietary scientific hardware with ISA or ESIA expansion cards and proprietary interface equipment that costs $$$$$$ or more.
Old equipment like that is still used all over the world, and replacing that hardware and equipment can be beyond costly, if not outright impossible.

If imaging said equipment isn't possible, the removal of these drivers (assuming they aren't backed up), it will make these systems unusable.
I'm not saying it isn't time to do so in replacing this equipment, but I hope those who are using said equipment with old operating systems and software have these drivers backed up, because after this, game over.
 
DrLobotomy said:
Nothing goes away on the internet that is hardware related. Many geeks of all kinds will have these stored somewhere.
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That isn't true at all; software preservation is in high-demand, and when some websites go away, such as Apple Penelope with it's slew of A/UX software, programs, and guides, eventually go away, then it is simply gone forever, at least online.
I have seen quite a few websites, which strangely are the only online source of older 8-bit to 32-bit drivers and/or software for older equipment and operating systems disappear, and is gone forever.

The Wayback Machine grabs a lot, but not everything, and surprisingly quite a bit is missed.
There may be diskettes, optical discs, etc. still containing said drivers and software floating around in the world, but finding it out in the wild or for sale used or NOS in stores or online can be extremely rare and/or expensive.

Get it now while you can, because it may be near impossible to find in the near-future!
 
xx0xx said:
You would be correct. There's a thread about it. Someone already archived it. 342GB worth.
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Only thing that sucks is at least going back to the oem site you could be reasonably assured of a clean download.

Now you will have to DL it from around the web and hope someone hasn't injected the package with malware.
 
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M76 said:
But WHY? It's not like it takes that much bandwidth. What traffic does this generate? 1 download / 3 months?
It also must need at least 10gigs, and I'm being generous there, drivers in the 90s and early 00s were barely hitting 5MB.
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alot of work to keep migrating them to xxx new web technology every 2 years.
 
Verge said:
alot of work to keep migrating them to xxx new web technology every 2 years.
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Not if your site is set up well. If it uses a database, migrating everything takes less manual labor than migrating half of everything. You don't actually think Intel is migrating every download one by one each time they change the page layout do you? Cause that would be the height of incompetence.
 
BTW I've just learned that this cull includes X58 boards, which we still actively use at my company, quite a few of them. Honestly they hold up very well, but if Intel wants to think only short term we'll be looking for solutions elsewhere in the future. I know one small company doesn't matter to them, but if I get the message perhaps others will get it too.
 
M76 said:
Not if your site is set up well. If it uses a database, migrating everything takes less manual labor than migrating half of everything. You don't actually think Intel is migrating every download one by one each time they change the page layout do you? Cause that would be the height of incompetence.
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gotta migrate databases to new xxx technology every few years. Who knows how their website is setup, this is years old stuff it could be linking too that they don't want to migrate to new tech.

You'd be surprised at some of the gross shit behind the UI's at probably every big company that isn't a silicon valley new startup.
 
OpenSource said:
I'd imagine some data hoarders from Reddit are already archiving all of this.
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xx0xx said:
You would be correct. There's a thread about it. Someone already archived it. 342GB worth.
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Haha, I was thinking the same thing.

Intel: Let's purge these files, there's no need to keep them.

Internet:
7D09B374-3CEC-40AE-831F-D5606B71FA07.png
 
Red Falcon said:
If imaging said equipment isn't possible, the removal of these drivers (assuming they aren't backed up), it will make these systems unusable.
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If the systems are already running, they have the drivers already installed. Removing the drivers may prevent you from reactivating the equipment should you have to restore the system due to a hardware failure but no critical system is going to be set to look directly at Intel's driver repository to stay running; which logically means that Intel removing the drivers won't brick an existing, running system.
 
Ebernanut said:
I think I've still got an old 440bx MB that's likely on the list but it will probably go out with the next round of old parts.
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if you are going to chuck it I'll happily take it off your hands

M76 said:
BTW I've just learned that this cull includes X58 boards
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I am still using X58, great platform, still fast enough for anything I've thrown at it, cheap RAM, cheap and easy to OC 6 core xeons etc
 
im not that upset by this. its their choice and theyll face whatever(this thread and more) backlash comes to them. but anyone talking about old proprietary hardware, why dont you already have all the needed drivers/software saved somewhere? why run the risk of something like this happening? ive always advised customer in those types of scenarios to have copies on hand on cd or floppy or something.
 
Algrim said:
If the systems are already running, they have the drivers already installed. Removing the drivers may prevent you from reactivating the equipment should you have to restore the system due to a hardware failure but no critical system is going to be set to look directly at Intel's driver repository to stay running; which logically means that Intel removing the drivers won't brick an existing, running system.
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Assuming the disks and/or software don't fail and they don't have any images for rebuilding said systems.
Media also fails over time, so like I said, make backups now while there is still time.
 
pendragon1 said:
im not that upset by this. its their choice and theyll face whatever(this thread and more) backlash comes to them. but anyone talking about old proprietary hardware, why dont you already have all the needed drivers/software saved somewhere? why run the risk of something like this happening? ive always advised customer in those types of scenarios to have copies on hand on cd or floppy or something.
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It's one of those weird things. I used to keep copies of all my drivers until I got conditioned that hardware doesn't need CDs or drivers included with them because we "have the internet now"
 
FLECOM said:
if you are going to chuck it I'll happily take it off your hands
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I'll keep that in mind next time I'm thinning out that room, it might have gone out with the last round of stuff but I think it was the celeron system from that era I got rid of.
 
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