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The answer is most likely an image hosted on an academic's personal site on a university server somewhere. Although how you would ever figure which is the actual oldest, I have no i idea.

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As a college student, I helped create this site in, I believe, 1994: http://pynchon.pomona.edu/ I don't know that I really count as an academic, but I think the site has survived because it's sitting on a university server.

The image links still work.

Unfortunately the mtimes on the images are all 1 Dec 2004. Probably the files all got copied without preserving timestamps.

Edit to add: Sorry, firefox misled me by showing the mtime of the html page when I asked for image info. The images are from 3 Jan 2003.

"Some of the initial work on this page was done by Penny Padgett."

That sounds like a Pynchon character...is she a real person or did Pynchon help you make this site?

I like the idea of some extremely tired 486 hooked up to a thinnet cable in some storage closet still serving up pages off of their Slackware Linux 1.1 install using CERN httpd. Nobody wants to turn it off because they know the hard drive will never spin up again if they do.

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