prokopetz:

Here’s a fun one: going by the timestamps (i.e., when you downloaded it, not necessarily when it was created), what’s the oldest piece of digital media you have kicking around on your computer?

For my part, it appears to be a MIDI file cryptically named “ANGLERS.MID”, which I downloaded in August of 1993. It has no attributions other than the name “Basil Hendrick”, which appears in a comment near the end of the data. I initially thought there’d be no reasonable way for me to share it, but discovered after a bit of digging that, by sheer unlikely coincidence, someone had converted the exact same MIDI file to MP4 and uploaded it to YouTube back in 2013; the result can be heard here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFu7oh29Zhw

So that’s the oldest bit of digital media I have on my computer.

How about you?

This is an interesting question!

My hard drive died early in 2014, so all I have is what I was able to rescue from it during the little time I had. The oldest file I could find was a copy of this song, which I downloaded in November 2007. Though I have an older computer somewhere in the basement that probably has some stuff from the late 90s, if I could be bothered to look.