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Comment by notpeter | Hacker News Reader

Oldest I could come up with is a book cover image for a 1993 Japanese book about MS-DOS Kermit.

http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/msben_i.gif

Currently served with a Last-modified of 1994-12-07T02:42Z -- Archive.org's oldest capture (Dec 1996) includes the link.

https://web.archive.org/web/19961222213301/http://www.columb...

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Another almost as old (archive.org copy from Nov 1996) but much more fun:

http://k12s.phast.umass.edu/images/Images.html

This is local copy of Anthony's WWW Images 1.8 released April 1996 by Anthony Thyssen. It was meant as a common set of common navigation icons for the web.

k12s.phast.umass.edu has been running continuously since late 1995. K12S was a spin off k12.oit.umass.edu (a free menu-based multi-user public access system for K-12 teachers and students). The S stood for SLiRP -- an open source SLIP/PPP emulator -- so they could offer emulated SLIP connections via the UMass modem-banks at no cost (local commercial SLIP accounts were $5.95/hr IIRC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp

Wow, people were still using Kermit in 1993? By then I thought everything had moved to x/y/zmodem.

I actually owned that book circa 1996 and used Kermit in a production system transferring files via dialup between a manufacturing facility in Mexico and their US-based headquarters. It was incredibly fragile. No idea now why Kermit was chosen, but it was a horrible tool for the job.

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