Just for fun: What is the oldest file on your computer?
Posted by Basic_A5181@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 28 comments
While performing a recent backup of computer HDD, I came across this Visual Basic file from 1983 back when I was experimenting with programming on my 386 desktop.
bobj33@reddit
The oldest file that I personally created and still have is my history report from 1991. That thing has survived the transition from floppy to QIC-80 tape, PD phase change disc, CD-R, DVD-R, and back to hard drive.
I have video game ROM images from my Atari 800. Those would have been from around 1982.
When I was in high school in the early 1990's we had various Internet joke files going back to the late 1980's. I copied some of those but the timestamps got lost along the way. They currently say 1995 but I know they were from the 1980's
I scanned thousands of my dad's slides and used the date command to set the file timestamp to the month / year that was stamped on the slide by the photo lab. So I the oldest says June 1966. Unix / Linux can have times before 1970. It just uses a negative number and interprets that as before 1970.
Paladin65536@reddit
I have a copy of Snipes, a DOS game made in 1983. For some reason though, my copy says it was last modified on 12-31-79 - most likely an error.
credditz0rz@reddit
Unfortunately I had a severe data loss after migrating to a new hard drive and repurposing the old one back in 2004ish.
So my oldest files are from 2004/2005.
I learned hard lessons on having backups lol
Deksor@reddit
It doesn't quite count because the file itself is from a couple years ago, but otherwise I guess a digital copy of a music tape record my dad did in the 1960s
garth54@reddit
Got most of my files from the first family computer, dating back to 1988. I have a hard time deleting anything, and am very good at archiving.
Boring-War-1981@reddit
I’m surprised so many people still have files from the 80s. I would have thought a lot of them would have been lost or deleted in the past 40 odd years
Hey-buuuddy@reddit
I’ve got a spreadsheet file from 1998.
OtisSnerd@reddit
complex1.rr - Tuesday, June 14, 1983, 3:35:14 PM, used by a train sim game, PC-RR.EXE - Tuesday, August 21, 1984, 2:35:38 AM.
rchiwawa@reddit
Got me beat by a decade and loose change
Max-P@reddit
I have a
BioNES.exefile dated 1998-04-06, downloaded in 2000 when I was 7, and was my introduction to piracy. It's from a backup CD I made in 2004 when I had my first go at trying out this Linux thing.I think I may have some physical 3½ floppies of Visual Basic 3 for Windows 3.1 from my grandpa somewhere with older files on it, but it's definitely not on my NAS.
I'm shocked the timestamp has been carried through so many copies to its current 26TB ZFS pool. It's been downloaded, unzipped, zipped, unzipped, burned to a CD, dumped from a CD, burnt to another CD, dumped again, copied via file managers, rsync'd a few times as I upgraded storage.
This-Requirement6918@reddit
Probably from 2002. Lost a lot of originals from the great hard disk crash of 2007.
rjchute@reddit
A little while ago I had a big computer crash and lost nearly all of my files and so had to resort to restoring most everything from various backups I had. While, ultimately, I didn't end up truely losing too much data, the file dates did not survive the backup/restore process and, as such, nearly everything has a 2023 date.
stuffitystuff@reddit
00:00:00 UTC 1970-01-01
Scoth42@reddit
Oldest period would probably be some of the CP/M stuff I have that are probably late 70s
Oldest I created would be some drawings and documents from my family's Atari 8-bit stuff that I've dumped and archived from the mid-late 80s
6502zx81@reddit
Visual Basic was released in 1991.
kabekew@reddit
BASICA was around with the first MS-DOS
themightyug@reddit
Also the 386 didn't appear until 1986
BCProgramming@reddit
Oldest file on my system is some GIF files which I believe are from a FRACTINT 18 CD-ROM, dated to 1993.
ArmadilloLoose6699@reddit
For me it would probably be a few lingering WMA and MP3 files from CDs that I ripped with Windows XP.
19chris1996@reddit
The laptop itself had its screen destroyed.
grimacefry@reddit
Not modified date but created date, 03-10-1993. I have network storage that's been upgraded perpetually all the way from a library of floppy disks, to zip disks, hard disks, NAS and now cloud. I have all the original files from all my school work - everything I ever did on a computer, and the oldest of which is invite.doc, a Word document for a school assignment in grade 4.
SporadicWanderer@reddit
I have some 1993 saved text documents - they look like “Gopher to email” searches of encyclopedia articles. Probably completed through a service on GEnie, my parents’ online service provider when I was 8.
JollyQuiscalus@reddit
Nothing too old now, but while using a Linux system, I seem to remember coming across some files that were timestamped sometime in the 1970s. Not the epoch date, but actual dates that varied. My guess is that these were originally from a Unix system and retained their dates when they were transferred.
EsoTechTrix@reddit
Which computer. There's technically nothing 'on' my first computer, but I have files I wrote to disk in the 80's. That was before system clocks existed though.
muse_head@reddit
I have some old (1980s) files from backups of old computers I've acquired, but the oldest file personally created by me is schoolwork from September 1997.
No-Succotash-9576@reddit
did you try run it and does it work? maybe you need to use dosbox to open it
AustriaModerator@reddit
should be something of 2003, mp3s or longhorn alphas i would say. the earliest ones date back to kazaa and emule days. i did buy used computers like an olivetti m24sp, which the previous owner used from 1986 onwards. numerous 5" floppies came with it, with letters written in wordstar on it.
ken_the_boxer@reddit
Probably some old DOS batch friles from the 80s