What is your oldest file/E-MAIL?

I'm not sure if this random question has already been asked on this board and thought I would ask anyway. What is the oldest file and/or E-MAIL still on your hard drive? I find responses to this to be interesting because there are some people who manage to save everything! I've tried that myself and only had one major data loss form a hard drive crash.

My oldest file is a font from an old Win 3.1 or Win 95 PC and the oldest E-MAIL seems to be from August 2, 1999.

 

Probably something on my IBM 5150...

 

I have an external harddrive with a backup of my old website and a computer backup on it from 2006 never toched it since I made the backup I can't even remember what's on it.
My oldest emails on hotmail date back to 2008 before that I always used to delete my emails

 

oldest e-mail is an e-mail with pictures of a birthday party from 27/10/2005

 

He said file on your hard drive, not archived on some floppies.

 

I have some card game design documents from 1996 still...

 

Well, some games, like Prehistorik 2, Stunts and Dune II, which were installed on 40Mb hard drive and then changed disks about 15 times. That's on my desktop, archived stuff can be way older, i have some files from early 1980.
Also i made a complete dump of PDP-11 disks and tapes before it was replaced with zSeries mainframe. That stuff works in emulator just fine.
For mail, i think it will be something from early networks before WWW and FidoNet.

 

If I unearth our old computer hard drive, I could possibly dig up some really old files. My dad used to do some programming, so I'm fairly sure he's got some old simple DOS programs around, more likely some text documents.
He kept incrementally moving them from computer to computer as we upgraded, until I just copied the files to a USB drive and kept them on our old 95/98/2000 system. I've kept that hard drive around because that was the first computer I used seriously for assignments and such, so I was scared I'd lose the files.

As for email? Didn't have my own, or have a need for one until well into 2006. I should be able to unearth those "Welcome to GMail" emails, as I still use the account as a backup email.

 

Well that's a pretty harsh limitation then, since HDDs haven't been around as long as most people seem to think... Just imagine someone with a piece of magnetic core memory or sth like that, with data still on it - he could run circles around everyone with a HDD, age-wise. I still have a punch card with my name on it (as in, stored as holes, not written with a pen) somewhere.

And if we start going the other way: The oldest file on my current notebook's HDD is <ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND>, because it only has a SSD.

 

I'm well aware that HDD's are still a somewhat young medium, the point was that whatever old file you might still have on one shows that you value it so much that a simple backup isn't enough. I don't see very many punch cards surviving this long in readable shape, only the most hard core archivists will have those. The same goes for other truly old mediums, all of which belong in a museum or in the hands of someone that can keep it safe.

 

What? A FILE you use or deem worth to keep immediate access to could be copied from a floppy or what ever medium you like onto your hdd. Trying to find the oldest disk you own isn't the point of this topic, its the file creation date of something you keep around, no matter the original media it came on. You are very much missing the point of this topic.

 

Probably some old program in Basic, I did in the late 80s which must be on a tape somewhere, MSX Basic didn't have a file system per se, so not sure it counts x)

 

Anything that could be transferred over would count. I used to keep programmed sprites/animations and a journal on tape with a C=64, probably should see if they're still usable. If anyone here is familiar with audio tape backups, would recording them as a WAV or FLAC file preserve everything?

 

oldest CD data (not music)..at least 1988..viva la PC Engine

 

Apparently the oldest file on my computer is an audio file dated April 26, 1999. I used to have a hard drive full of documents and media dating back to the mid-90s, but I had a hard drive failure in 2005, and unfortunately I hadn't done a proper backup. So most of that stuff is gone, but I was able to recover some bits and pieces from CD-Rs I had lying around. I've come to the conclusion that most of it probably wasn't worth keeping since it was mostly pretty childish (since I was a child at the time), though there are a few things I wish I still had.

 

I think I've seen C64 archives that had tapes as MP3s, so yes, that seems to work.

 

It's probably some of my music from when I first started ripping CD's to Mp3 probably as far back as '98 maybe.

 

It depends. If you're talking about DAT or any kind of audio tape that uses uncompressed PCM, it should give you an exact duplicate of what's on the tape. If you're talking about analog audio cassettes, like the ones that were popular throughout the 80s and part of the 90s, you're not going to get an exact duplicate. Any time you do an ADC (analog to digital conversion) you're going to lose some fidelity. This is an inherent limitation of digital systems. However, with cassettes, the original audio quality is not very high to begin with, so the loss is probably negligible.

 

The tapes in question are analog and were saved with a C=64 and VIC-20. I don't mind fidelity loss as long as the data can be interpreted from a digital recording of them. Thanks for the info.