Hard Drive Archaeologists: Find your really old files and post them
14 replies, posted
The other day I remembered I had a decade old HDD from three computers ago. Before nuking and integrating it into my current PC as a backup drive, I decided to crawl through it and look for some gold. Turns out it had a lot of stuff that had been carried over from two computers before even that, about 2001 where I would have been four years old. Was still firm on reusing the drive but didn't wanna risk losing something great so I copied the whole thing into a partition on my 1TB.
The oldest was this one, where I discovered you could OPEN NORMAL PICTURES IN PAINT. Which was pretty fucking amazing to my tiny young mind.
[t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/111996868/2015-1/General/New%20folder/Mary%20River.JPG[/t]
I found a few other things made in paint, including blueprints for a tank that can't aim directly behind itself and some mind-blowing revelations about Lego.
[t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/111996868/2015-1/General/New%20folder/exterier%20of%20tank.jpg[/t][t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/111996868/2015-1/General/New%20folder/Revolution%20of%20Lego.jpg[/t]
There were also 400+ screenshots from RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. This was the only file that had been renamed so at some point I must have thought it was particularly funny.
[t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/111996868/2015-1/General/New%20folder/Drone%20Family.jpg[/t]
And also my sick avatar from 2007 which was probably made for [URL="http://www.futurerp.net/pages/player.php?id=22366"]FutureRP[/URL] (basically a HTML PvP MMO stitched together with broken PHP. I'm considering banding some FP'ers together to try dominate this shitty game)
[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/111996868/2015-1/General/New%20folder/new%20avatar.jpg[/img]
and finally this addictive little game [url]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/111996868/2015-1/General/New%20folder/cosmiccrush.swf[/url]
Now get data mining and upload those gems of yours. Strike the drive!
I don't know if this counts or not, because its not something I've had for a long time, yet it's possibly be one of the oldest usable files on my computer at the moment.
It's a incredibly old 3D model of a Volkswagen Beetle
[thumb]http://puu.sh/g4U0w/a4abe88389.png[/thumb][thumb]http://puu.sh/g4U35/93b3cc7630.png[/thumb]
The file was last modified in July of 1985 and was hosted on the Lightwaved BBS in 1993.
Also I'm not 100% certain but it's highly possible that this particular model was originally the model of the [URL="http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/artifact/206/559"]Volkswagen Beetle[/URL] that Ivan Sutherland,
and his students made way back in 1972, as the wireframe is similar to the wireframe renders of [URL="http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/artifact/206/558l"]Sutherland's model[/URL],
though it seems that the model was converted to tris at some point, probably when it was converted to a .lw file.
Its kinda neat that this model even exists after been passed around for last 40 some years.
Oh yeah if anybody actually wants the model, you can get the model [URL="https://web.archive.org/web/19960101000000*/http://www.3dcafe.com/models/volkswgn.lzh"]here[/URL] using the Way Back Machine.
Damn, now I realize I'm quite a boring person.
The oldest crap I had was on a crunchy Asus laptop, which I've nuked many times. Then I have my Dell laptop which I still have and took quite a beating. I've trashed two hard drives with it thus far (without even dropping it??)
All by all, I don't have any old files unfortunately. When I find said computer run too or I want to clear up space I simply nuke the drive, and keep my most important files.
But on the other hand, have the oldest file I have, although it's from 10 december 2014.
[IMG]http://kittehcat.org/upl/study_chandelier_single.png[/IMG]
I have the original quake cd release somewhere on here.
I have a .rar folder which has a complete backup of my grandfather's laptop from like 1996. Whilst it doesn't have any documents (My cousin had access to the laptop before I could archive it and she erased all the old pictures and text documents without giving a reason) it does however contain a bunch of old save games from DOOM and C&C 95.
[editline]23rd February 2015[/editline]
Oh, there's also this old photo of my window from 2002.
[IMG]http://puu.sh/g99ew/7e8f8b0f80.JPG[/IMG]
[t]http://findsatan.com/images/hobos.jpg[/t]
I'm not going to upload it, in part because it's three 700 meg files on dialup-class upload speeds and in part because it's all warez, but the oldest file on my harddrive [i]that I made[/i] is a .zip archive I made back in '03 or so that contains a mountain of stuff I downloaded off LimeWire back in the day. There might even be a few holdouts in that archive from back when KaZaA wasn't a guaranteed 'You have five new viruses!' install.
There's nothing spectacular in it. Bunch of oldies, as that's the music I listened to back then, few game archives(Midtown Madness 1 and 2, Monster Truck Madness 2, Viper Racing, Brood War), a copy of Winamp 3 that I still use to this day for listening to E-radio(Hey, it works, and it uses like half a meg of memory!), but mostly just a mountain of oldies.
There's a couple older ones, but those I downloaded much more recently. My install of Scorched Earth has created dates in the 90s, as does my copy of the 3D Maze screensaver, but I got those in like 2006 or 2007.
I have old videogames made by me using GameMaker and cmd code.
I have the HL2 beta and WC Mappack which are warez, but they are kind of difficult to obtain on the internet without some deep digging or signing up on Russian websites. A while back I was kind of obsessed with all the beta HL2 stuff.
I have some random troll batch files I created a while back.
Old map files for the Source engine I created. I tend to get started on a map and lose interest half way through so they're mostly unfinished maps.
A collection of audio files, filled with hidden gems.
Old images and videos. Forgotten programs. Random bits of code. Fucked up looking models.
A lot of this stuff was easy to find as well since I dumped a lot of it in a folder called 'crap'.
I might consider uploading this junk somewhere so that it will live on when this machine dies.
Wow, I didn't realize it, but I have Doom maps that I made that date all the way back to 2006 when I was in middle school. There was this big thing among Doom clans where they made maps built to just dick around in. There were 'bedrooms' for each clan member that were unique and featured whatever that person was into. I wasn't in a clan so I made my own map for me and my friends. I had a blast playing online with my buddies and adding rooms.
I have a laptop somewhere with Macromedia Flash installed on it!
Currently the oldest thing on my PC is a PSpice installer (and requisite installation) from 1998. It's distributed by my university to this day because "it works."
I recently recovered a bunch of stuff from my old floppy disks.
Oldest photo I found is of my brother's 10th birthday in 1999. (I'm the kid on the right, was 4 at the time)
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/vBzYKWd.png[/IMG]
Oldest file though is from 1992 and is a transcript of letters from my grandma.
Another thing I found interesting were files with extensions for obsolete programs such as America Online browser.
I've got quite a few things, as one of my old drives still serves as G:\ on my computer, and I've yet to clean it out.
Some ancient minecraft beta stuff from before I learned that F2 took better screenshots.
[thumb]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8733190/lolcreepers.JPG[/thumb]
[thumb]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8733190/creepertowerdemo.JPG[/thumb]
Logo for an Unreal Tournament single player campaign that I gave up on long ago.
[thumb]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8733190/newpinsecuritylogo.png[/thumb]
A level from said campaign, where you revisited a level from the original Unreal game, but reworked to look abandoned.
[thumb]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8733190/newscreeny3.JPG[/thumb]
Picture of the ship level that would've been the climax of the mod.
[thumb]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8733190/newscreeny2.JPG[/thumb]
I'll see if I can load up one of my REALLY old drives that contains real cringe-fuel from when I was 12.
Oldest files I have are some Doom WADS made by [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Harris_and_Dylan_Klebold"]Eric Harris[/URL]. Dated around 1996.
I was looking through my old hard drive and found this glorious thing:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/FAh2gAu.gif[/img]
An avatar that someone made for me back in 2003? 4? because I asked for one that had the prince from Prince of Persia.
Honestly I think he took my name as too much of an inspirational thing. Jeez, that was a long time ago.
Then again this is what my name looked like at the time:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/Tg3xXSa.png[/img]
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