When you Google your name, what is the oldest thing you wrote that turns up on Google? The oldest thing I found is something I wrote on comp.risks in 1985.
Things I wrote on older forums, like GEnie, is either not accessible to Google or gone to the great bit bucket in the sky.
It occurs to me that there must be tens of thousands of people with things they wrote that are older than that, that are visible on Google. I would exclude Google book searches from that. Are things posted on the Arpanet or Bixnet still visible on Google?
It was easier to Google my name 5 or 6 years ago. Up until then, references to “Joel Upchurch” were almost always me. Now I add -lagrange and -remax to my search to exclude the guy that that bought the joelupchurch.com domain name.
Last thread about finding Google hits from your name, I remember finding some alt.math posts of mine that must have been from around 1995 or 1996. I don’t intend to dig through all of the pages of results from the other ten thousand people with my name to find them again, though.
Unless you cheat. I have something that I wrote in 1980 which I scanned and uploaded in the mid-1990s. And since I uploaded it and know where it is, I can probably contrive a Google Advanced search that will return it as a hit. But that shouldn’t count, right?
In 1967, I was in college, and among other things I wrote a lot of poetry. I sent some of it to a major publisher in NYC, and of course it was never published. Quite to my surprise a record of that submission exists on-line.
No, the poetry itself doesn’t appear on-line. If it did I’d have to change my name.
The oldest thing I can find is a comment I made on a Spanish website in 2006, in response to a blog about the issue of Spanish immigration.
It’s a single paragraph, written in Spanish, in which I say that the ‘‘immigration problem’’ as defined in Spanish public discourse seemed very similar to the way the problem is defined in the United States, and it was interesting to me how sociological trends hold across cultures.
I was a senior undergraduate at the time taking two courses on the history of Spain, and my professor was from Spain, so I had Spain on the brain.
It’s funny how I don’t even remember writing this.
My wife and I got on Usenet via one of, if not the very first, public ISPs - the World (world.std.com) in 1988. We had some written stuff before that, but it had been posted by other people for us.
It is both interesting and depressing to read stuff that I wrote that long ago. I used to be an expert in a piece of 3D animation software - expert enough to help write a Computer Graphics World article on one of it’s features. And I’ve so completely forgotten it that I’m amazed at my own posts.
Apparently they have modified Google Groups so that one can no longer search for any e-mail address!
The first thing that pops up when I google my full name is my bachelor’s thesis, from 1977. I’ve also found some pieces I wrote for the college newspaper (which is now archived online) from 1975 and 1976. I don’t think anything I wrote earlier than that is online, but it seems older than anything yet submitted on this thread (as panache’s actual 1967 writings don’t seem to be online).
I can barely remember having a GEnie account, much less which round tables I was on. As I recall, I got the GEnie account so buying a DC Hayes Micromodem for my Apple II wouldn’t seem so futile.
I would tend to allow the 1975 claim, but I’m a little iffy about counting it if a link isn’t provided. I’m also a little iffy about claims that weren’t actually associated with someones actual name, since that makes it hard to verify.
I’m also a little unclear about how college newspaper article from 75 would end up on the internet. Was it prepared on a computer or did someone OCR it?
I used to run an e-mailing list related to Major League Baseball in the early '90s and would post on rec.arts.baseball. I also ran a weekly trivia quiz on rec.games.trivia around that time.
