[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What is the oldest image online in which the...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What is the oldest image online in which the link is not
broken?
I think there are amazon affiliate banner image links from the 90s
that still display images, such has the 'buy a book' icon. How
about google image logo links from 1998. I wonder if those still
work.
Author : paulpauper
Score : 156 points
Date : 2021-02-03 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
| runjake wrote:
| I don't know what you'd consider a link. The web only came into
| being around 1993 or so.
|
| In academia, it's not uncommon for me to come across FTP
| directories with files that have been sitting there since the
| early 1990s.
| a0-prw wrote:
| probably goatse dot cx, but I'm not checking
| ryancnelson wrote:
| There's Usenet archives going back to at least 1990. I'd search
| those for image urls, then find ones that still work. I just
| checked and sumex-aim.stanford.edu isn't a host anymore :(
| Nition wrote:
| I was hoping there might be something on:
| http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
|
| But alas, support for images hadn't been invented yet.
| notpeter wrote:
| 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...
| notpeter wrote:
| 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
| phjesusthatguy3 wrote:
| Michigan State University just finally (last year, maybe the year
| before) killed my personal site I had set up when I was a student
| in 1994. It had one picture on it.
| dhosek wrote:
| I have a page, http://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ which has
| been continually updated since 1995. It's had some URL changes
| (it was originally served via FTP under a domain that I lost to
| missing a registration renewal back in 2004) and back-end
| technology changes (it was originally manually-updated HTML), but
| I was able to find a 1997 version of the page in the wayback
| archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980121235911/http://quixote.co...
| cmpb wrote:
| It definitely doesn't fit the bill of this thread (no images,
| not original links), but it's an interesting site nonetheless.
| I'm amazed at the number of books you've read over the years.
| I'm shooting for 3 books this year, and that's a 200% increase
| over last year!
|
| Do you have good memory for the content of the books you've
| read? Or do some specific books stand out even over several
| years?
| core-questions wrote:
| >I'm shooting for 3 books this year, and that's a 200%
| increase over last year!
|
| I'm gonna countersignal the other guy who replied to you and
| tell you that this is great news. I have had years in my life
| when I have read 40+ books, and years where I have read none
| at all. Setting a goal to carve off time for reading is huge.
| There _is_ something special about books, something no other
| form of media does in terms of engaging your brain as an
| active participant. It 's good for you.
| ghaff wrote:
| I like reading books though I don't read _nearly_ as many
| as I used to. It 's one reason that I'm in the camp of
| going meh when people go on about needing free WiFi on
| flights. It's one of the few times I really unplug. OK, I
| watch videos and play games too but I don't actually miss
| being offline for 6-12 hours.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > I'm shooting for 3 books this year, and that's a 200%
| increase over last year!
|
| I mean... there's probably no point forcing yourself if you
| don't want to. People who read a lot of books, myself
| included, don't do it because we're _diligent_ , we do it
| because we _enjoy_ it.
|
| There's nothing special about books. You might as well say "I
| am going to finish 3 video games this year" or "I am going to
| go fishing three times this year".
|
| If the achieving of goals itself is what brings you
| enjoyment, then by all means, go for it.
|
| I suppose there's also a case to be made for people who tend
| to not take enough time off and who need to set themselves
| goals for leisure time for that reason.
|
| Anyways: Don't torture yourself.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| "online"? That would be something on a newsgroup, BBS, usenet or
| public FTP. It wouldn't be something served over HTTP.
| tantalor wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990504112211im_/http://www.goo...
| eznzt wrote:
| Obviously archive.org links do not count. We have this but it
| redirects: https://www.google.com/google.jpg
| dn3500 wrote:
| The oldest images here are from September 1992:
|
| https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/rogues-gallery/index.htm...
|
| They were originally on an ftp server and became available on the
| web in 1993 at:
|
| http://www.umich.edu/~archive/apollo/
| curlypaul924 wrote:
| The oldest image I could find on w3.org dates back to 19 Nov
| 1994: https://www.w3.org/Icons/32x32/warning
|
| The W3 consortium itself was only a month old at the time.
| mvuijlst wrote:
| This is my 1995 website: http://www.netpoint.be
| aaron695 wrote:
| You want the oldest working image hyperlink?
|
| Or just the oldest image that's at the same link? Maybe on
| Gopher?
|
| For the oldest working image hyperlink, OJ's trial is up there
| with Space Jam. Like Space Jam the links are internal, but
| clickable images -
|
| http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/
| stolenmerch wrote:
| This was posted to the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992 and I
| _think_ it 's the original URL, though maybe not. Surely there
| must be an anonymous FTP site that has images that predates
| HTTP...
|
| https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/pictures/LHC5.j...
| [deleted]
| d--b wrote:
| This says it's from 1994:
| https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/
|
| And still I find the pictures astonishingly good for 1994..
| JosephRedfern wrote:
| EXIF data says that images was generated using Photoshop CS3,
| which was released in 2007.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Has the first photo on the www been lost?
|
| Because I can't find it easily online.
|
| "Berners-Lee made a webpage to advertise events taking
| place at CERN and uploaded Gennaro's picture of the band.
| The image was tiny--only around 120 pixels by 50 pixels--
| because the early web would have struggled with larger
| images. It was about the size of a stamp".
| bionade24 wrote:
| Nice detection!
| kordlessagain wrote:
| And the HTML on that site says this: <meta
| name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive 6">
| [deleted]
| nicoburns wrote:
| > And still I find the pictures astonishingly good for 1994..
|
| I guess it's probably a scanned print rather than an image
| from a digital cameras.
| DanBC wrote:
| Yes, but it's not in "websafe" 216 colour or super
| compressed jpeg.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Tangentially, JPEG was only two years old when that site
| was published!
| nicoburns wrote:
| Fair point. I remember an earlyish web, but I guess 1994
| is a little before my time (I was born in 1993).
| baby wrote:
| Are we going to DDoS a historical vestige?
| monkeybutton wrote:
| The first thing this made me think of is the Astronomy Picture of
| the Day blog. Their first entry is on June 16, 1995 and they've
| been updating it ever since:
| https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap950616.html
| acd wrote:
| WWW the project 1992
| http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
|
| source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
| curlypaul924 wrote:
| 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.
| salutonmundo wrote:
| Of _course_ one of the oldest images on the internet is of
| anime...
| dublin wrote:
| 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
| godot wrote:
| 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.
| dolmen wrote:
| Lena is also mentioned in the last sentence.
| schoen wrote:
| > 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.)
| Retr0spectrum wrote:
| I don't think mirrors or archives really count, in the spirit
| of OP's original question.
| tpmx wrote:
| 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.)
| mike_d wrote:
| 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.
| amjaeger wrote:
| The old MIT leglab website is still live and hosted by csail.
| Wayback machine has oldest capture back in 1996. I checked a few
| of the images of the older robots and wayback machine shows the
| links were unchanged since96.
| http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/leglab/
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210126053221/http://www.ai.mit...
| stunt wrote:
| I always try to put some context behind questions like this. I
| would mention why I'm interested to know or why I need that.
| blinding-streak wrote:
| https://www.spacejam.com/
|
| This whole site from 1996 still works!
| dstick wrote:
| Oh man, how our attention span and curiosity has changed. Can
| you imagine a sitemap like this, today:
| https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/sitemap.html ?
|
| It's glorious!
| piker wrote:
| Probably a wasted effort back then, too, to be fair.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| > "Never on the Internet have so few worked so hard to bring
| you so much in so little time."
|
| Gotta love the editorializing right there.
| city41 wrote:
| The Cookie Settings link looks to be incorrect. I was curious
| what cookie settings would mean on a site from 1996.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| I'm curious if they are going to leave it in its historic form
| or replace it for the upcoming sequel being released this
| summer.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| I was wondering this, too, recently. spacejam2.com is kind of
| interesting in that they sell jams and also offer to sell the
| domain for a million dollars.
|
| "You are welcome to buy our jam or you can also buy our
| website"
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing that. That's the most dedicated
| domain squatter I've ever seen.
| Dragonai wrote:
| This is hilarious, thanks so much for sharing. Very funny
| halfway-legitimate approach to cybersquatting.
| 51Cards wrote:
| They must be continuing to update this as in 1996 it wouldn't
| have had links to Privacy Policy pages on WB's current website.
| I think that makes it even cooler as they are actively
| maintaining it in its historic form.
| adventured wrote:
| In the earliest (December) 1996 version that Archive.org has,
| the site has an initial landing page you have to click
| through before you arrive at something similar to the
| homepage today:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19970124032137/http://www.spacej.
| ..
| htrp wrote:
| https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/space-jam-for...
|
| There are a group of fans who've kept it up and updated....
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| It's so fast!
| FlyMoreRockets wrote:
| https://missaonmaria.com
|
| Specificially, note the Netscape Now! image:
| https://missaonmaria.com/img/netscape.gif
|
| Interestinly enough, the Internet Archive has no record of the
| site.
| netsharc wrote:
| Well, that's grim, it's a webpage about a missing person
| (Google Translate confirms).
|
| I wonder how that got resolved, 24 and a third of a year
| later..
| lupinglade wrote:
| Pretty sure it's actually a musician's promotional page and
| it seems it might be from 2020!
| netsharc wrote:
| How do you make these 2 conclusions?
|
| The page actually contains modern things like references to
| Google Analytics and Apple meta tags, but that could be
| because the archival tool keeps modernizing the site.
|
| Edit: ok, looking for "Maria Korhosen katoamistapau" gives
| results from Amazon music and YouTube... looking for the
| person's name got me nowhere.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| I'm very confused about the "NeoCities" image next to the IE
| and Netscape images. NeoCities is from 2013... Was there a
| different NeoCities that I'm not aware of?
| dragonshed wrote:
| NeoCities is a modern recreation of GeoCities.
| Trufa wrote:
| I'm sure it's not the oldest but this one is an interesting time
| capsule:
|
| https://www.spacejam.com/
|
| Also here, I don't think there's an image but this is the first
| website:
|
| http://info.cern.ch/
| arethuza wrote:
| I'd have thought the old green W3 logo or one of the various
| CERN ones would still be at their original locations - but
| apparently not!
| hlesesne wrote:
| Unfortunate that the links to the code for this no longer
| exist...
| http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Oracle/Overview.htm...
| boulos wrote:
| The images from CS348B at Stanford in Winter 92 are still up:
|
| http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs348b-competition/cs34...
|
| but I think everything on the site was actually posted sometime
| in 1994.
|
| Unfortunately, the University of Utah recently deleted all alumni
| home directories and websites (I managed to save what I could).
| There were probably some fairly early pages up there.
| handelaar wrote:
| Do I have to be the oldest fart in the room to just naturally
| assume that since Mozilla was the first popular browser to show
| inline images, that its homepage is the first place to look?
|
| http://home.mcom.com
|
| Last-Modified: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 19:00:00 GMT
| freebuju wrote:
| Firefox really blew the early lead that they had. Fills me with
| immense sadness they went the Yahoo way.
| chc wrote:
| It's somehow comforting to see that image maps from 1994 still
| perform like absolute crap in 2021. It's just an extra bit of
| authenticity.
| wahern wrote:
| > image maps from 1994 still perform like absolute crap in
| 2021
|
| I don't follow. Are you referring to the progressive GIF
| rendering? It seems to be working beautifully and as
| intended. It's a 40K GIF that downloads at 5K/s, presumably
| because of limited server-side throughput (artificial or
| real). If you just open it locally or host it somewhere else
| it renders instantaneously, without any hint of its
| progressive encoding.
|
| Or maybe that's what you were referring to--the possibly
| deliberate uplink throttling--and we just have different
| opinions about what's "beautiful".
|
| I'm curious if anyone has written a JavaScript library that
| emulates the browser rendering experience of 1990s modem
| links. That'd be cool, both from an implementation standpoint
| as well as viewing experience.
| dublin wrote:
| NCSA Mosaic was the predecessor to Netscape and Mozilla, and I
| think was the first browser to offer inline images. I remember
| going to Interop in 1993 and everyone was blown away by the
| demo of Mosaic and its inline images showing O'Reilly's GNN
| (Global Network Navigator) site. Somewhere, I might still have
| an advertising card the O'Reilly folks were handing out about
| it. You can see more here (and yes, bizarrely, wood-cut-look
| icons were a big design fashion trend for a period in the early
| '90s. Sun's TOPS used them extensively, too...)
| https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/
|
| That said, there were several earlier browsers that could
| opened image tags in another window or app - Viola, Cello, etc.
| (Even Lynx, which still exists for some bizarre reason...)
|
| As hard as it will be for the younger crowd to believe, at that
| time every new web site on the Internet got posted to the NCSA
| "What's New" page, so people would know what all's out there!
| prawn wrote:
| Haven't seen you on here before. Think we had a friend in
| common - Martin B - from evolt days.
| handelaar wrote:
| <waves>
|
| And at one point nearly neighbours in N7 if I recall ;)
| ZacharyPitts wrote:
| How about http://www.armory.com/, a geek house in Santa Cruz from
| the late 80s through the 90s? If you look at the list of images
| at http://www.armory.com/images/, you'll find
| http://www.armory.com/images/arm.gif with a creation date of
| 1994-02-10.
|
| Heck, doing an `ls -la`, I have files on there that I have not
| modified since 1996.
|
| R.I.P. John DuBois, founder of Armory
| http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/
| tpmx wrote:
| Still running the Spinner/Roxen web server, I see:
| http://www.armory.com/internal-roxen-roxen :)
|
| That tiny Swedish company was my first employer 1997-2004. Fun
| times.
| stupidcar wrote:
| The answer is most likely an image hosted on an academic's
| personal site on a university server somewhere. Although how you
| would ever figure which is the actual oldest, I have no i idea.
| jandrese wrote:
| I like the idea of some extremely tired 486 hooked up to a
| thinnet cable in some storage closet still serving up pages off
| of their Slackware Linux 1.1 install using CERN httpd. Nobody
| wants to turn it off because they know the hard drive will
| never spin up again if they do.
| pingswept wrote:
| As a college student, I helped create this site in, I believe,
| 1994: http://pynchon.pomona.edu/ I don't know that I really
| count as an academic, but I think the site has survived because
| it's sitting on a university server.
|
| The image links still work.
| dn3500 wrote:
| Unfortunately the mtimes on the images are all 1 Dec 2004.
| Probably the files all got copied without preserving
| timestamps.
|
| Edit to add: Sorry, firefox misled me by showing the mtime of
| the html page when I asked for image info. The images are
| from 3 Jan 2003.
| defen wrote:
| "Some of the initial work on this page was done by Penny
| Padgett."
|
| That sounds like a Pynchon character...is she a real person
| or did Pynchon help you make this site?
| [deleted]
| pushswap wrote:
| Space Jam's website from originally 1996 is still up:
| https://www.spacejam.com/
| curlypaul924 wrote:
| One image that certainly isn't the oldest but might be one of the
| oldest important images that is still online at its original
| location is the Blue Ribbin Online Free Speech Campaign animated
| logo (https://www.eff.org/files/br.gif).
|
| This image dates back to 1996 when the EFF launched a campaign
| against the Communication Decency Act (CDA). Many of the pages
| across the internet turned their background images black in
| protest of the CDA. What remains of the CDA is today known as
| "Section 230".
| MontagFTB wrote:
| The religious cult Heaven's Gate has a website that's been
| maintained since at least the mid 90s. Some of the imagery on
| that site is pretty old.
|
| https://www.heavensgate.com/
|
| Edit: Though the cult's mass suicide in March '97 is well
| remembered, according to Wikipedia there are former members that
| maintain the website:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...
| saberdancer wrote:
| "In the same month, the group purchased alien abduction
| insurance that would cover up to fifty members and would pay
| out $1 million per person (the policy covered abduction,
| impregnation, or death by aliens)"
|
| Thank you for a new rabbit hole.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Are we restricting format? Because queries like '"index of" pcx
| 1991' will reveal quite a bit (or TGA, TIFF, and PICT). Whether
| they've been up since the early 90s is another question.
|
| I created a tool that will show you the images in the apache
| directory listings. Here's an example
|
| http://9ol.es/apache-img.php?u=http://aries.ucsd.edu/ICONS/A...
|
| These kinds of old icon libraries can be a good source for
| finding old sites. Here's more from that same domain
|
| http://9ol.es/apache-img.php?u=http://aries.ucsd.edu/ICONS/I...
|
| I used this technique to find an old icon set for the promotional
| page to some software of mine to give it a 1993 feel
| http://bootstra386.com
|
| I Need to go back and finish that...
| julianlam wrote:
| I really appreciate the small details in that page... Such as
| using Date.getYear() instead of Date.getFullYear() to render
| the year in the guestbook, so the years are all 19121. Ha!
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's actually slightly more work to break things. Line 6:
|
| https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386/blob/master/hom.
| ..
|
| Also the site totally works in Netscape Navigator 2.02 and
| renders nearly identical down to the pixel
|
| Careful observers will note the Easter egg :)
|
| I'll bring the Pentium 90 up if people want, I moved the main
| site to a raspberry pi just for power reasons
|
| Edit: i brought it up. The link on the main page works. I'll
| probably not being back the twitch stream unless there's
| demand though
|
| Edit 2: brought the ssh and telnet back up as well
|
| Edit 3: The source for the image browser:
| http://9ol.es/pre.php?url=apache-img.php
| core-questions wrote:
| I am going to do my damndnest to shoehorn BOOTSTRA/386 into
| a project at work. It's goddamned beautiful.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Sweet. I keep meaning to getting back to finishing my
| latest version and making the floppies but yeah, time
| management is a perennial challenge.
|
| I used to schedule appointments with myself but it's so
| hard to keep up the act, sleeping in and doing nothing
| all day is so nice.
| netik wrote:
| I guess we need to keep in mind that index of is going to
| report file creation date, and it's hard to know when the file
| actually entered the web vs. "Was created, someone left it on
| disk, and then started a web server."
|
| I still have emails in my homedir from 1990. Ugh.
| flemhans wrote:
| What's the oldest MP3 file still online?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Oldest I have, is a site I let a friend from IRC setup on my box.
|
| http://l8r.net/amiga/
|
| Lots of the images are from 1996:
|
| amiga/images:
|
| total 1112
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12187 Nov 9 1996 amigactit.jpg
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2252 Nov 9 1996 Amiga.gif
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9282 Nov 9 1996 BlueBack.gif
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45784 Nov 9 1996 IBrowseNowAnim.gif
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18014 Nov 9 1996 JoshSuit1L.jpg
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4880 Nov 9 1996 JoshSuit1LNail.jpg
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 93300 Nov 9 1996 logo.jpg
| bbarnett wrote:
| I just realised .. this site is probably older:
|
| http://geraldholmes.freeyellow.com/
|
| but in the mid-2000s, when I discovered it was dying, I
| restored it here by finding images on archive.org:
|
| http://l8r.net/geraldholmes.freeyellow.com/
|
| Not necessarily as per topic, but it was quite amusing at the
| time. Still a little funny now, at least to me.
| tomcam wrote:
| How do you like DEC? Think the microVAX has a future?
| bbarnett wrote:
| That's actually a buddy I knew on IRC, from 95/96 etc.
| Haven't seen / typed at him in 20+ years.
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