

Ask HN: Your Oldest Finger Print on the Internet - SoftwareMaven

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])?<p>For me:<p>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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hoag
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...](http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990209094832/http://www.hai-
maps.com/marcweb/)

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! :)

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anigbrowl
"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...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:z7bPHSaLsCUJ:w2.eff.org/Censorship/Academic_edu/CAF/batch/%3Ff%3D1993_03_28.txt+%2Bbaphomet+%2B%22eddy+robinson%22&cd=16&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)

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DanielKehoe
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.

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allenbrunson
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...](http://www.sci.wsu.edu/math/faculty/barnes/borland/simtel.htm)

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!

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zmmz
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.

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RiderOfGiraffes
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.

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joezydeco
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.

------
Dramatize
Does an archive.org snapshot count?

[http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20000901083336/http://www.g...](http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20000901083336/http://www.gametrade-
au.com/)

My first web business.

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MaysonL
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.

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kaisdavis
My old Angelfire site from 1995!

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dkersten
Just curious: did you solve that problem? :)

