I’d love for people to share links to their oldest remaining presence on the World Wide Web - outside of archives.
For me it may be this review of an album released in 1998 by Wrapped in Wire magazine: https://www.wrappedinwire.com/V/Vojna.htm.
If there is a legitimate timestamp for the link you share, that’s even better.
Not exactly “Web” presence, but as (some) old Usenet posts are accessible on the WWW, mine dates from October 1990.
Google used to have archives of a small fraction of my Usenet and ARPAnet posts from the mid-80s … OK, here’s a post to SF-LOVERS about the recent film “Real Genius”.
Oh, “outside of archives” … well, the unofficial FAQ of the record label 4AD was originally put together by me in the late ‘80s and is still online after going through a number of other owners.
The image on the (disused) home page of my personal website is a picture of my then-house takin in 1994 or so.
Hail Bob!
I was able to find some Usenet postings of mine from 1995, but I couldn’t find any prior, which is a shame.
Same here. Apr 1990. https://groups.google.com/g/alt.mud/c/dHrSKkpSzYI/m/cvNeJ6jzv1wJ
For me, it’s my website, which went up in October of 1998. My previous websites don’t exist outside of archives.
If you include archive.org mirrors, it apparently captured the stuff I put on my ISP-provided web space as a teenager, going back to 1998. No, I’m not going to share links.
There’s probably some more embarrassing archived Usenet stuff of me debating details of Start Trek from earlier, but fortunately I can’t find it. Most of the stuff from back then was pretty ephemeral.
I actively try to cycle my accounts every few years and not keep to a long-term online identity, so hopefully my oldest living presence is pretty young!
I also do this. When I was growing up the internet was both a lot shadier and a lot less shady, my parents didn’t really mind me using it, but they were very adamant that I never tell anyone my real name or address or anything (good advice), so I never did, and in so doing, internalized online identities as ephemeral and not really a part of myself. Having a Facebook still makes me feel weird.
To answer the actual question, an account I have an the Garry’s Mod forum from 2005 still works, and a local news article about a competition I took part in in 2001 still exists. Idk if that counts cause I didn’t make it.
Somewhat relatedly, Facebook reminds me every year of an that time my friends and I went to Yellowknife, Canada in 1987, because I wanted to see what happened if I tampered with EXIF data. It’s actually a picture of someone else’s car on the moon with various rocks tagged as people. None of the tagged people existed in 1987, and none of us have been anywhere near Yellowknife.
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Wait - did you work on this? It’s about your oldest living presence. ;)
Oops, I misread. I removed my comment, sorry bout that
For a second I thought you might casually reveal that you’re Tim Berners Lee. Now THAT would be been embarrassing.
I had hopes, because then we could all chat with Tim about the W3C’s endorsement of DRM in Web standards ;)
My oldest remaining presence:
Unfortunately my older personal pages are gone, this includes the university page, and a 90s user page on a local pages provider :(
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http://binarymax.com/art/ used to be hosted on a shared Vax webserver from my student university account in 1999. I had something earlier running on the same account in 1996, but it’s not on the web.
Love the Piet Mondrian style PC you have posted there.
Thanks! Built that pentium 1 machine from parts I bought at an old school auction site in 1997. Masking tape to block the negatives and used acrylic paint. I used that box with part upgrades here and there from original build until 2002, when I finally gave it away and switched to a laptop.
Did you write Piet code for it?
Considering the oldest writing of mine I can find online is on Dan Lyke’s website, I’m pretty sure he can win this one: https://www.flutterby.com/danlyke/graphics/stereo.html (I’m guessing this was written in 1993 or 1994.)
Then again, that might be considered an “archive”, since it was originally written elsewhere. Notice the FidoNet address: Dan helped me set up a point address off of his. I didn’t actually ever get any mail, because I didn’t have anyone to talk with!
He founded one of the first ISPs here in Chatt so I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the oldest presence on the WWW game.
Seems the original web presence is lost 😞: https://twitter.com/danlyke/status/1415383300743393281
Aside from a redirect from just https://www.flutterby.com/danlyke to a newer personal site, the rest of the tree under that was copied over from the similar Chattanooga.net/danlyke URL some time in 1997 (when I registered Flutterby.com). I think Chattanooga On-Line got the T1 in October of ’94, before that it was the TBBS+satellite Usenet feed thing.
I might have done some reformatting at some point, but if so it was minor (at some point pre-CSS I had some color scheme choosing code going on).
The first post on Flutterby.com as a blog happened in February of ’98 via the Newwwsboy email gateway I wrote (that HotWired actually used for a while).
Found another: https://www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/ugrad-news/Issue1/futurenet.html (1995)
Ha.
This thread is making me feel very young - I was born in 2000, so I think the earliest presence I have on the web are some bamzooki [niche UK children’s tech … thing?] forum postings that I made when I was about 7, or early Roblox games that I made when I was 8. I don’t really want to see that stuff again.
It’d be between ’06 and ’09, which is, like, recent.
Maybe these “attitude” icons, since there are apparently still people playing Civ IV with the BUG mod in 2021.
If pre-Web Internet presence counts, I can get back to 27 May 1984: https://www.info-mac.org/viewtopic.php?t=16994 (message 22). Maybe that counts as an “archive” though?
In terms of Web content I actually authored, it’s probably this site from 2002: http://shelbylogansrun.com/ This is so old it has an old intro about how old it is (“this was TEN YEARS AGO”). :)
I think this is the oldest of mine:
http://dougal.sourceforge.net/
It’s the homepage for an open source POP3 mailbox washer I wrote in Perl; my first open source software that had > 0 users I didn’t personally know.
Dates to the early 2000s. I’d post the exact date but Sourceforge is currently in maintenance mode.
The very first thing I did online was write an online signup form for a hosted LAN party at the dial-up ISP I worked for in 2000/2001. The wayback machine is lucky enough to have a snapshot of the page.
The next thing I can find is when I poke my head into the Horde IMP project and add a file circa 2004. That project got circulated on a companion software disc when you bought an HP SuperDome minicomputer. I thought that was hot shit when I saw what was on the disc and realized that when you bought a $20 million dollar computer, you also got some software I wrote for a printing company.
Forrest Cook and I put up the NCAR weather station sometime around 1994-5.
https://archive.eol.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/weather.cgi?site=ml&period=5-minute&units=english&&fields=tdry&fields=rh&fields=cpres0&fields=wspd&fields=wdir&fields=raina
It’s still running my original gnuplot script to generate the plots, as far as I can tell…
At this point it’s probably my YouTube channel. I used to have youtube.com/shadowh511, but in terms of account age that’s one of the oldest web presences that I still have. That youtube channel was made back a whole gender ago when I was in middle school and has always just avoided being a part of the partner program. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if i focused on it as a main career prosepect.
The most awesome thing ever from 2008 is still pretty awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFPlcrAdP34
The oldest thing I know of offhand is a site I made in 97 and kept updating for a couple of years before abandoning it.. Which you can see in the text. Anyway, here you go, a time when webrings and frames were still ok: still on tripod!
I love the design on the image selection.
I’ve been writing a blog since 1997. I think I registered a domain and moved the contents to it from Geocities in 2000 or 2001. I’m sure there are a few other traces, but not as sure I want to do anything to draw attention to them. The blog is probably embarrassing enough.
Living? My original vanity domain was registered in 2000 and still exists, though its original content is long gone.
There’s still some very small fragments of personal sites I had in the late 90’s up on the Wayback Machine, but that’s not “living”.
A few years ago there was a photo of me on a “Foothills Reunion” page (Foothills was a popular talker in the 90’s). The photo was of me when I was 13 or 14, so mid 90’s.
There’re still some Usenet posts I made from the 90’s reachable via Google Groups. The oldest I could find in a brief search is from 95, though I was active on there before that (93ish IIRC).
There’s still some software I wrote in the 90’s available for download on Aminet.
A Feb 1997 post on comp.lang.forth is the earliest post I can find (though I’m mentioned in the comp.lang.forth FAQ before then). I was 15 at the time, and was posting about a port of someone’s 486 assembler to a 32-bit Forth I’d written. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t on the “internet” at the time, this was probably Usenet via a local BBS.
Edit: oops, I just read the “oldest remaining presence - outside of archives” part of this OP’s message.
I interpreted “archive” to mean stuff like archive.org. Some place keyed by date crawled rather than date written.
My 18 year old personal web site.
It used to be for an old dial up ISP that I worked at in the 90s that hadn’t shut down their site from ‘98. But, I linked to it in my newsletter once and then influx of traffic must have been odd and they finally killed the spot.
Boooooo. Did Internet Archive manage to capture it before it went down?
I’m certain it did. But, it’s down right now. But now I feel like I need to capture that history somehow.
I had this Angelfire website during high school, in the late 90s and early 2000s.
It had all sorts of personal web stuff on it for a while, and then when I started doing more serious-ish web development on a different platform without ads, I put the placeholder page you see now and used it as a generic personal dropbox-like dumping site since it had FTP access.
I vividly remember the first time I published on the internet. Surprisingly it’s still online at some url. June 1999:
https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/libc-alpha/1999-06/msg00017.html
The earliest I could find is a bug report I sent to Debian, against CVS, back in late 2000:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=76494
I’ve maintained websites prior to that, dating back to ~1997 or so, but none of those are available outside of archives. Most aren’t even in them, either.
I can’t find any of the usenet posts (heh or fido, not that it’s strictly internet as such but was mirrored onto it for a while), or the earlier webpages - the biggest of it, “the town of emulatoria” should predate zophar’s domain by about 2 months putting it at around sept. 1996. There is a brief mention of burgertime emulation that Kevin Brisley and I poked at (only mentioned by one alias), the later revisioning of the Arcade Emulation FAQ, 0.25 Jan 1997.
Huh. It might actually be a demo on an Arduino library I made nearly a decade ago to use the Sphero toy as an input device/controller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqgj1ArspKw
https://linuxlop.tripod.com
A website from 1998, which a friend and I used to sell cheapbytes Linux CD-ROMs in The Netherlands. I was 16 years old and as you can see in the screenshots, I had the bad habit of logging in as root.
Edit: one of the screenshots shows XAnim. Just found that the XAnim website is also frozen in time (1999).
I kind of envy all the geezers here. Y’all have seen life before the Internet. Going from reading cyberpunk novels to actual living in aspects of imagined futures sounds dope.
It’s why I follow Gibson on Twitter today. Lil’ snippets of ye olde (cyber) days fascinated me.
I used to read a ton of “cyberpunk” authors from the well-known Gibson and Stirling to the less well remembered Shirley and Kadrey, and there’s very few of their worlds I’d like to live in.
Haha, fair enough.
Oldest remaining is probably http://xass.sourceforge.net/ (2002-2003) including my CSS take on GTK1 buttons. Most of my original web presence is gone due to Geocities, temporary ISPs, temporary University accounts…the web is surprisingly volatile.
I guess browser.org (mainly lynx.browser.org) which came online in late 1996.
(There should be usenet and mailing list posts from late ’92, early ‘93 floating around in archives tho’)
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I had an access to the Web pretty late. The oldest thing I could still find is some help pages in a French Linux wiki (Lea Linux) I wrote in the early 2000s. Sadly the website did a migration since then so the history is lost, but this one talks about Mandrake 9.1 so it was in 2003.
It might be possible to find some emails I sent to mailing lists in 2000 / 2001, but I couldn’t.
As for the oldest website / source code I wrote that’s still online, it’s probably this from 2004. Terrible, terrible code (with variable names in French), but still my “madeleine de Proust” (https://github.com/catwell/iatax).
My Slashdot account from 1998 seems to still be active, though I haven’t posted in years. Everything else pre-2000 seems to have gone away (members.aol.com homepage, Kuro5hin account, etc.).
This post got me thinking, so I dug through some old archives and found this page I put online in Jan 2001, and just put it back online: https://erty.me/oldest/
I hasn’t been online continuously (and was originally hosted on a different domain), but the file attributes still have the creation date as Jan 2001.
I also found and reuploaded my first multi-page website, a school project about riparian areas, that I put online in May 2002: https://erty.me/riparianareas/
I built it in Microsoft Frontpage, and some of the generated javascript was so old that the site was broken and nothing showed up -
document.body.sourceIndexdoesn’t exist anymore! So, I had to do some little polyfills to bring this up to the 2020s :)I know my livejournal exists, but I’m not going to link to it. I suppose that’d make my earliest surviving presence somewhere around 2000. I had stuff earlier than that, but it’s long since gone down/is only on archive.org.
Edit: if we count archive.org, I was able to find a letter to the editor I wrote from 1998, but it’s been offline as long as the magazine in question has been dead.
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