mdfind 'kMDItemContentCreationDate < $time.iso(1994-06-23)' > out.txt
Highlights include:* Castle Wolfenstien for MS-DOS (1983-6-29)
* Lisa OS Source Code (1983-6-29)
* Classic Mac Disks from the Boston Computer Society (1984-12-24)
* Atari 7800 Ms. Pac Man Source Code (1988-12-24)
* Pyroto Mountian BBS files (1990-10-5)
* Jumpman Lives Source Code (1991-04-13)
* Delightful AU sound files and TIFF images from Sun and NeXT systems (1992-2-29)
* Tim Berners-Lee's WWW Browser Source Code for NeXT (1993-6-21)
* C64 Disk Images (1994-6-17)
from the README:
G.R.E.A.T Version 0.92
GREAT is the Graphical Environment and Desktop for UNIX.
It is developed by the Free Software Assiociation of Germany
with Ruediger and Michaela Merz.
GREAT is a free binary distribution.
Copyright (C) 1993, 1994, 1995 FSAG
this is interesting, because it appears to be the first FOSS Desktop Environment. i used it on my grandmothers computer. unfortunately the sources appear to be lost. i was only able to find this binary release, and because of its historical value i am holding on to it for dear life.To grandparent post, Buddy Holly might have been on 98, I'm not sure, but was on the 95 CD along with a trailer to the movie "Rob Roy" and a couple other videos. Might have been different across regions, I'm not sure of that either.
archive.org has the iso browseable
https://ia904501.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/6/...
and search for the FUNSTUFF/VIDEOS folder.
31MB, Cinepak, 320x240, 15fps, audio 8bit @ 11kHz
i just found a few hundred rust files coming out of cargo crates dated 1970.1.1 and 1973.11.30. i had no idea that rust was so old. but it explains the name at least ;-)
Their timestamps don't show those ages, unfortunately, as they have been transferred from machine to machine and medium to medium over the decades.
Here's one of my own COBOL files:
0130* INSTALLATION. Giacomo Software, P.O. Box 584, Hamilton, 3300
0140
0150 DATE-WRITTEN. 29 MARCH 1984.
Would you believe that was from an 8080 disassembler written in COBOL? I suppose we did silly things like that because we could. And we used whatever it was that we happened to have on hand.“I suspect these new evicted files take advantage of a trick in APFS: as far as I can tell, they consist of the file with its attributes and extended attributes intact and stored locally, but no extents for its data. Thus, when you ask for the file size, it returns the size it would be when downloaded, although the file only takes the space required for its attributes and extended attributes, until it has been downloaded.”
Also (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3150-g...):
“Check if a file is dataless and then only access it in a safe context. To do the check, call stat or getattrlist and examine if SF_DATALESS is present in stat.st_flags. Be aware that stat and getattrlist both trigger the materialization of any intermediate folders in the file’s path, if they themselves are dataless.”
⇒ doing stat on an entire filesystem will materialize all directories, but not its files.
All Great Artist biographies have a chapter titled "The Fire."
-- Tom Sachs
It started life as a plain .txt on disk that I'd manually copy over from computer to computer, first via floppies and eventually null modem cables and ZIP disks and thumb drives.
When email got popular I started emailing it to myself as a way of storing it in the cloud. Eventually it made it into Gmail and I could store it there, versioned, across generations of computer platforms and ISPs.
Then Google Docs came around and it's lived there ever since. I still go through the version history there sometimes. It doesn't go all the way back, but does have some interim license keys if I ever need an older version (like some gray market version of Windows 7 for a refurb laptop).
While even now with the filesystems that support them they're tied to that instance of the filesystem (ie: non-modifiable, unlike Windows), which has always puzzled me given the need to variously restore from backups (or just have an identical copy in a destination) where one would desire such info*.
* When I last looked into this I saw some quite creative workarounds, such as a script loop where for each file to be copied it changed the system clock to the date of the timestamp, so it was recreated in the destination.
https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/cbtm.md
Can save & restore both btime & ctime via "underhanded" filesystem debugging utility scripting. (It is in Nim which might be an obstacle for some, but honestly it is a very simple program to port to whatever.)so there are 4 different values:
the original time when a file was originally created.
the time when it was first created on this device.
the time when a particular inode was created.
the time when the content of the file was modified.
and you could add more: if the file contains a story, how about the time the original story was written?
or the time the content (and not the metadata, like the exif data of an image) was modified?
there are use cases for each. but of all of them the last modified time is the easiest to reason about.
However it's easy to preserve the date created timestamp during a copy using the native Robocopy utility, among many other methods. It's simply treated as date modified is: modifiable and arbitrary.
This makes restoring from backups sensible. Have a drive that has died? Can do a file-based restore without the need for images and preserve such metadata. Individual file unexpectedly deleted? Restore it and regain the timestamps. The benefit is one has a transferable reference for when files were originally made, even if they lack internal metadata that stores this (such as eg: EXIF for images).
Under Linux, even with its now kernel-based NTFS support, it just adds NTFS-specific data like date creation timestamps as peripheral extended attributes, which Linux file managers broadly don't expose or handle well. While native filesystems like EXT4 which support creation time are impractically limited to unmodifiable date creation timestamps based on their first creation on that particular instance of the filesystem, without hacky and fragile workarounds.
That is despite `touch` being ubiquitous on Linux for modifying date modified timestamps (showing that in practical terms, it's considered similarly arbitrary metadata) which from what I've seen Linux users appear to have no disagreements with about its utility.
As a Windows user who would like to migrate to Linux this aspect makes it frustratingly a non-starter, as even if one uses SMB to access the files (adding its own layer for such compatible metadata, regardless of the underlying filesystem) Linux file managers still don't handle well extended attributes so management for such files under Linux isn't at parity.
I was always an island computer geek isolated from the mainland (except BBS long di$tance) so we had to start our own commercial ISP in the mid 90s to bring it. My first USENET was a post to alt.flame in September 1994: "Bigfoot! Watch out, boy! They are looking for you in Des Moines. Time to move on. Warning: the Kansas city account is being monitored by professors from the UT Anthropology Dept. Don't use it. Use the Finnish anonymous server through East coast account number 3 to forward new address. Courage, beast."
So there was an MIT Center for Cognitive Science! Did you ever find intelligent life on Earth?
I really should go through some old 3,5" disks to see if they still work to see if there is anything there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_goal#/media/File:Ghost_G....
For the young'uns, "Shirley" is a reference to a cultural phenomenon in the early 80's through early 90's around a line that would go something like this: "Surely it's an operating system file. Yes of course, but don't call me Shirley!" It was started by a popular movie, but became widespread throughout the culture.
Alternatively, it could have been a speech to text accident and I'm reading way too much into it. I choose to disregard that possibility. Shirley you understand.
Airplane (1980)
In terms of actual timestamp, the oldest I found was "Aug 18 1994", a text file with some notes from a concert that I wrote to send to friends.
-rw-r--r-- 1 uid uid 21714 Aug 18 1994 concert
I did test some of the floppies in later years and still seemed to work. I still have the floppies but no longer have a working 5.25" drive to try them on!
As for files I created myself, probably emails from 25 years ago, as I lost pretty much everything I had from the '80s and early '90s in a fire (and all my older emails migrating from older ISP/university email accounts, and didn't really do anything worth saving in the late '90s).
Stretching the definition, I did recently uncover a video tape containing an award-winning media fair project I did with a couple friends in the mid '80s that I hope to digitize just as soon as I obtain a VHS deck I'm certain won't damage the tape.
This was on a HP benchtop gas analyzer where I had added the HP Basic option which was needed to handle the complexity of petroleum data like only companies having mainframes had been able to, up until 1979. Most other research operations did not need Basic since the underlying expert system was adequate for less data-intensive work. Those who had a bare-bones analyzer were way ahead of most of the world though, which was still going with analog chart recorders and simpler mathematical calibration techniques that had been well-established.
Interestingly, there are still plenty of non-petroleum gases and other analytes where the raw analog data is so simple that no computer has ever been needed at all, some needing not a calculator nor even a slide rule. But people naturally have all-computerized systems in the modern world anyway, including the complex software that for such simple analysis provides more room for error than the analog days. In theory and in practice as directly observed.
But the chemical assays were not related to the gases, I just liked having a personal desktop system that would compute, and wrote a couple hundred lines that would get it done in a way that was completely auditable. The workflow included manually entering data that had been gathered from bench work in the non-gas labs.
Slightly different syntax allowed my app to run on the P-E equivalent to the HP, and I managed to keep at least one P-E running until 2014 so I could operate the vintage analyzers in my own lab. But stopped running my old chem app on them in 1993 when my employer got their first office PC with Windows 3.1 and GW-Basic. So that was the first actual DOS version of the same old thing, which is the one still in use on my FAT32 partition when I boot to DOS, as well as run from the command line when booted to 32-bit Windows.
When it comes to timestamps a couple old EXEs that have been carried forward on the FAT32 volume are Tetris and Battle Chess from 1989 which I can still run any time since.
That looks like it for files that are actually useful still.
Years later I managed to find another disk of the same model, but I can't find the board-less disk with the data... did I throw it away?
It very slowly and inefficiently compares hashes of files in its directory (and subdirectories) and deletes duplicates. I don't think I've actually used it in years, but it invariably gets restored along with some old family photos that happened to be in the directory it lived in.
Ironically it is older than any of the files remaining there.
The drive was always a secondary bulk storage drive that just kept moving into each new computer I built. It finally died a few years back and I still have a dump from it. Nothing super interesting that far back, just schoolwork and some photos. I didn't get into programming until much later in life.
Outside of that, the oldest file in my home dir is "de01file.cpy" from 1994-01-06, something I saved for reference from my old Job.
> Oldest thing that I remember was perhaps my parents dropping me off to pre-school before leaving for work and me crying - circa 1985.
My first computer memories, were playing attic attack on a spectrum when it first came out and my uncle getting a miniature handheld golf game, which must have cost at least £60 in 1982 approx and then a c64 soon after. My cousins also had an atari 2600, even then I thought it was terrible! The defender clone was good though.
What I'm really curious about is the accuracy of some of those really old memories. How we see the world changes over time. The box that Fischer Price toy came in looked massive to me but would be tiny to me now. What other things do I remember through the eyes of a child that are significantly different from reality?
In any case, astronomy has that beat hands down, as with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maisie's_Galaxy ("Maisie's Galaxy (also known as CEERS J141946.36+525632.8) is a distant galaxy located at z=11.4 that existed 390 million years after the beginning of the universe.")
41493 Feb 1 2004 linus-says-linux-english.au
I thought it was funny that it is an audio file of how Linus says Linux 8-)
for a while after installing Slackware ~1998 I pronounced it with a long i Line-ux possibly until that recording spread this far.
1969-12-31+19:00:00.0000000000 ~/.cache/paru/clone/aws-cli-v2/src/awscli-2.16.0/PKG-INFO
Mildly surprised it was an AUR package.https://www.neowin.net/news/a-quick-look-back-at-when-micros...
* 1980 STOMP.MOD music file[1]
* 1987 - hitchhik.exe the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy text-based adventure game.
* 1988 - QuickBasic 4.5
* 1990 - a bunch of Screamtracker S3M/Mod/XM music files.
* 1991 - Moneky Island original SCUMM game.
The oldest which I created is some QuickBasic code which says 1999 but I think it was a couple of years older. A drawing and some Python and C# from 2002. Looks like my code from the mid 1990s and any school essays of the 1990s are long gone. About the oldest emails I have are 2002 as well.
[1] "stomp da diko-tek #hoffman / mono formerly known as.. dreamfish! / mono this is true minimal techno. this track started with a sample from retro dna - mix 2. i took a 2 beat loop, contured, distored & filtered it to create a clanky hard-edged sound (sample 3). the rest you'll have to work out yer self. surf the mono website www.scene.org/mono". That dates back before I was born.
I wouldn't believe all the MODs dated 1990 anymore either then, though one I've checked is from about then ( https://demozoo.org/music/97104/ ), another is 1992 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oadg4mc9ww - check this out it still holds up today despite being 4 channel 30+ years old, in a way that the techno one really doesn't).
Monkey Island was released in 1990 so that could be accurate, QuickBasic 4.5 was released 1988 (although no way I had it in 1988). Summary: the oldest things I have are my brother's mod interest, my coding interest, and some PC games.
Oh! And some slightly less ancient with original timestamps still on my server home dir (now Raspbian, but from some mixture of SunOS etc)...
% ls -alrt ~/ | more
-rw-r--r-- 1 dhd dhd 1981 Jul 20 1989 .rootmenu.old
-rw-r----- 1 dhd dhd 56 Jun 9 1990 .XLog
-rw-r----- 1 dhd dhd 37 Dec 21 1991 .forward.example
-rw-r----- 1 dhd dhd 6019 Apr 6 1992 SCI_arrives.z
-rw-r----- 1 dhd dhd 42 Apr 9 1992 .mailrc.OLD
-rw-r--r-- 1 dhd dhd 934 Apr 9 1992 .defaults
-rw-r----- 1 dhd dhd 0 May 28 1992 .pnewsexpert
-r--r----- 1 dhd dhd 615 Jul 28 1992 .bprofile
...fun to see the `.defaults`; i forgot about that one (edit, and i forget now even when/where i came across it)
I don't really use it myself, it's leftover from an IT project.
This was from an industrial facility where I had done field training back in 1982. Their mainframe had a "public" terminal where contractors had access to their inventory control system, so whoever was on-site had to wait for their turn at the green monochrome dumb terminal, then continue to wait for our printouts to appear afterward.
Apparently sometime between then and 2019, I would imagine they might have replaced the mainframe with a PC-based server, but it would be difficult to be sure. Expected steps could have included first simply replacing the dumb terminal with a PC on the desk for contractor use instead, no differently than the rest of their office people would want.
But for all I know they very well could have had the latest modern server gear back there in a rack somewhere. You would never know the difference.
Regardless, by 2019 there had been no more public terminal for a while. Each contractor had their own laptop to access the facility system, still running the same desktop Dataflex program since 1983 on a DOS platform. Laptops weren't around back then, so that's a clue.
Without that, a contractor was useless, so the incentive had always been there since the first person figured this out in the 21st century.
At this employer, when we wanted to get in there, our IT guys had no luck at all. The plant couldn't help much, they cloned their own systems in a convoluted way rather than revive from decades-old files and that was it. I was provided with a Windows 7 laptop that successfully ran Dataflex to work from, but more than one person had probably never known how to prepare these to begin with. You definitely had to be able to take your data with you and print it later on a non-DOS printer.
First made it run on bare metal, then hammered away until it ran self-contained on a Windows 10 laptop and connected properly to the system when on-site, just like everybody else had who treated the old laptops having Dataflex like gold, since it was like their ticket in through the gate of the facility.