Comment by cout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cout | Hacker News Reader

As far as images that a modern browser can display, JPEG was created in 1992 and GIF in 1987, so there isn't going to be much prior to that. HTTP and Gopher date back to 1991, so the oldest image online that still resides at its original location would be on an FTP server.

Here's one of the oldest I can find, with timestamp 1988-07-06 00:00:

ftp://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures/anime-manga/UruseiYatsura/Images/mendo.gif

or via http:

http://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures...

This is the oldest one I can find on nic.funet.fi, from 1991:

ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/pics/comp/net/misc/dnesu.gif

They have mirrors of many of the old ftp servers of yore, so if there's an older image out there, that's the place to look:

http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/

Most of the other old FTP servers I remember (sunsite.unc.edu, ftp.simtel.net, ftp.uu.net) have long since shut down. The ftp server at ftp.sunet.se is one of the oldest still running. Perhaps someone else knows of an older one?

I tried to find a copy of lena.bmp/lena.tga/lena.pcx since those file formats pre-date GIF, but I came up empty.

Of course one of the oldest images on the internet is of anime...

Lena (or Lenna, spelling varies) is not anime - it's a crop of a Playboy centerfold that has been a standard bitmapped reference image for decades. It's been used in literally hundreds, if not thousands of academic papers on image processing, as well as a variety of benchmarks, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Are we looking at the same image? The one I clicked on in GP's message is an anime-looking person holding a sword. It doesn't look much like the picture on the Lenna wikipedia article you posted.

Lena is also mentioned in the last sentence.

These conversations happen so often on HN I wonder if there is some sort of working memory limit on the participants that rapidly removes context from the comment they're replying to:

> > > > > Here are some numbers: [6, 2, 34]

> > > > That's neat, one of them is prime

> > > 6 isn't prime, its factors are 2 and 3

> > Are we reading the same comment? There is a prime there

> 6 was mentioned there and it isn't prime

It's like some sort of weird comedy skit.

Third base!

Three is not an anime.

No. 6 definitely is an anime.

These conversations happen so often about anime I wonder if there is some sort of working memory limit on the participants that rapidly removes context from the comment they're replying to:

> > > > > Here are some waifus: [lenna, 6rem, natsuki]

> > > > That's neet, one of them is best girl

> > > lenna isn't from an anime, she exists irl

> > Are we reading the same comment? That's just your opinion, man

> 6rem is best spacing and material design is justice

It's like some sort of tone-deaf comedy skit.

I am thoroughly entertained.

No soap, radio.

I've gotten enough upvotes here (4) that I feel I need to ~~ruin~~ explain the joke, lest HN get the idea that this is upvote-worthy in general.

This is low-effort humor. I took the comment above and replaced words with memes from anime, tech, and earlier in this conversation thread. There's no (intentionally) meaningful relation between rem and Rem, or the number 6, I was just pattern matching things that sounded similar. Basically the equivalent of an "I hardly know her" joke. Funny only for the meme value, and not what I come to HN for.

In this particular thread, ^^that^^ is the joke — that we mistake unrelated comments as meaningful replies.

I personally found the metajoke amusing, whether it was intended or not. The comment, low effort as it is is no different from the comment chain it describes. Great stuff.

I'd like to propose that we generalize this particular part of the conversation, and coin the term "XY Argument" (unless a name for it already exists?)

> > > > That's neat, one of them is prime

> > > 6 isn't prime, its factors are 2 and 3

I believe it's the equivalent of the [XY Problem], except in the context of an (imagined) disagreement. It happens because the second comment is misinterpreted to be arguing against the first when really it may be in addition. It can be fixed by readers taking a charitable interpretation of the second comment, or by the second commenter's author making it clear that they're not disagreeing, as in,

> > > Yes, and 6 isn't prime, its factors are 2 and 3

I'm pulling out these two comments because it's a much more common pattern than just this comment chain; I think it happens all the time with text in general. Actually, I'm commenting here because it just [happened to me] in a different context. Someone I thought I was arguing with turned out to mostly agree with me — but because we failed to re-affirm the parts of each other's arguments that we agreed with, it seemed like we disagreed more than we did.

[XY Problem]: https://xyproblem.info/

[happened to me]: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/2565...

It's from Urusei Yatsura[1]. It indeed looks like a bunch of Anime stuff. Scans of animation cells and other ephemera. It would have taken awhile to download on a modem.

The HTTP header is reporting:

curl -I "http://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures..." | grep Last-Modified

Last-Modified: Tue, 05 Jul 1988 22:00:00 GMT

But it's just forwarding the filesystem mtime.

There's no exif data for this image, which totally checks out because it predates the exif format.

[1]: https://uruseiyatsura.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page

That's Mendo Shutaro from Urusei Yatsura

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

> As far as images that a modern browser can display, JPEG was created in 1992 and GIF in 1987, so there isn't going to be much prior to that.

PBM is probably older than GIF and still has software support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm#File_formats

though apparently not directly in browsers! (I would have expected it did, but I couldn't get browsers to render PBM files directly.)

Netscape Navigator supported PBM (at least in some versions you could even write directly into a frame/window via JS in order to compose an image on the fly).

Huh! So in that case, it could be that there's an old PBM file somewhere that could be a contender for this record.

I completely forgot about that! I very vaguely remember experimenting with it, and I think I never got it to work. I can't find anything on it now, though.

I don't think mirrors or archives really count, in the spirit of OP's original question.

This is sort of a special case. It's a matter of republishing using the original file metadata and file contents, using the same domain but under a different path.

(Meaning the the current maintainers could fix this by doing a single "ln -s" command, ehrm. @ acc.umu.se.)

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html

The list of all webservers used to fit on a single page, which might be a good starting point. However, at this point I believe anything still functioning might fit your definition of a "mirror" as few things still speak HTTP/0.9.

That's a great resource! Most of those links are no longer functioning, but I did find this image:

http://info.in2p3.fr./cc.gif

dated 30 Sept 1992, which is pretty old as far as the web goes.

If your sole criterion is "file in original directory on hard drive still functioning after X years" then I doubt we're going to go back much further than the late 2000s

That is sad if 2000 is the last year.

Not true. https://www.spacejam.com/ Has been up and unmodified since 1996.

Depends how you define unmodified. There's clearly a redirect for https there.

Anyway, a previous webmaster of this site replied another time it was posted here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23709016 if anyone's curious.

The original question was ambiguous; it said "online" but seemed to imply "on the world wide web". I'm not going to judge whether the links I provided count; I leave that decision to the OP.

I would agree that an archive ala archive.org should be disqualified, because few people would go to that site as the original. To me, Sunet is a little more grey, because while it is an archive/mirror site, many people used it and linked to it as if it were the primary source and not just an archive site. Before the web was indexed and search engines became popular, large mirror sites were the easiest way to access a variety of content, all in one place.

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