“… and this is mine, all this is mine, I’m claiming all this as MINE.  Except that bit; I don’t want that bit.  But all the rest of this… is… mine.”

– Cat, Red Dwarf, “Confidence and Paranoia”

As one or two of you know, I love to play around with old computer hardware, especially some of the devices that were very well designed but just didn’t catch on for one reason or another or have been left by the wayside, passed by with supposedly superior successors.

I’ve got a working eMate with the flip screen, a Mac Powerbook (a recent acquisition), a iMac (now running Ubuntu linux), and a HP Jornada 690.  I finally took the time to work on the Jornada a bit and replaced the back up battery and it works like a charm.  Problem is, I have Active Sync 4.5 installed and it will only sync with version 3.5 or earlier. 

Not a problem; I uninstalled my 4.5 and went up to the Microsoft web site to download the older version.

Except that they don’t have it available anymore.  What?  Is it so much to keep a 3.5 megabyte file around for archival purposes?

I usually get my old hardware without any extras; I’m ecstatic if I get a power cord and a data cable.  Not a chance I got the software with this one.

Fortunately, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has come to my rescue yet again.  I took the link from the HP web site that was supposed to go to the download screen at Microsoft (it redirects to a page to download the latest version) and pasted it into the field and pressed the ‘Take Me Back’ button.  A few seconds later, I can see every version of that page that they archived from Microsoft.  A few clicks later and I’ve downloaded the old software from archive.org’s cache of the data and after installation it works like a charm.  I’m going to test to see if my new Windows Mobile 6 device will work with it and if so, I may keep this version around – at least it works.