Ask HN: Your Oldest Finger Print on the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Your Oldest Finger Print on the Internet

Just for fun (and to sadly date myself...): What is the oldest finger print you can find of yourself on the Internet (content you created or that was created by a human about you [e.g. no auto-generated birth announcements, etc])?

For me:

Linux Activists mailing list archive (Sept 10, 1993): http://ftp4.de.freesbie.org/pub/misc/tsx-11/mail-archive/linux-activists/Volume6/digest (search for "travis jensen")

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Well, it's certainly not the first thing I ever made, but the earliest thing I can find dates back to 1996: it's a Star Trek fan page listing fans' pages dedicated to the then forthcoming movie Star Trek VIII: First Contact. Just go here (http://www.reocities.com/Hollywood/6075/) and then do a find for "marcweb" on that page, and you'll see it. :)

Amazingly, I also found some pretty functional cached versions over at http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990209094832/http://www.h...

If you click through to the main Win95 theme site(!) you can even click through to the above-mentioned Star Trek VIII site via the Start Menu! :)

"I contend that Usenet is a new communications medium, and not a broadcasting one. In addition it is a medium without standards organisations, hence the current success. Remember, you are not being fed this stuff when you turn your computer on. You choose which newsgroups and messages to read. If you want someone else to make those decisions for you, fine, but don't make my decisions."

...among other comments on comp.org.eff.talk, March 23-25 1993 (eddy robinson)

oops http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:z7bPHSa...

July 1st, 1993 on the old WWW-Talk mailing list.

It was in a discussion with Marc Andreessen (who was still at NCSA) and others concerning whether "WWW documents" should have two spaces after periods (like typewritten pages) or just one (like books). A few weeks later, we were debating whether web browsers should accommodate Adobe's new PDF format.

It's fun to see how the issues that implemented the web were hashed out on the WWW-Talk mailing list: http://www.intercom.co.cr/www-archives/1993-q3/index.html

Extra spaces after periods, indeed.

I wrote an HP LaserJet III printer driver for Borland's Sprint word processor way back in 1991. Every now and then, when I google myself, a copy of it comes up somewhere. Here's one:

http://www.sci.wsu.edu/math/faculty/barnes/borland/simtel.ht...

my driver is hplj3j11.zip, partway down the page. For that audience, all filenames had to conform to the DOS 8.3 standard.

I just skimmed my documentation in that archive, and hoo boy was I ever earnest. I took myself so seriously!

While I was on the net before, the first time that I would have left a fingerprint would have been when I got into online gaming. I would have to dig deep into my memory to think of what my usernames were, but I'm sure that some of those old Counter Strike, Diablo and Starcraft rankings and match results are somewhere.

I have a couple of mentions in 1992. Here's one:

http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/users92.txt

There are other mentions of shareware I wrote in 1989, but the "fingerprint" itself is more recent, and recently updated.

I found a g-file that I wrote in 1985.

It was an impromptu instruction manual for an Apple ][ paint program that everyone was pirating at the time. I guess it made it's rounds around the BBS circuit and was captured in the textfiles.com archive.

Does an archive.org snapshot count?

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20000901083336/http://www.g...

My first web business.

Found one 1990 reference to a shareware program (Scroll2) I wrote back in 1987, as well as a couple of mentions in Dave Winer's Frontier source code dating to '93.

My old Angelfire site from 1995!

Just curious: did you solve that problem? :)

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