I’m not looking for system files or programs, but the oldest document you created. I have some files related to my wedding going back from almost nine years ago.
I FTPed the SF-Lovers Digest going back to 1979. Does that count?
I have documents I last used in 1991, created even before, that I’ve kept over years, transferring from one PC to another.
I’ve got CAD files dating back to January, 1994. Of course, I no longer have a copy of Generic CADD so they’re completely useless to me.
Word document, created April 2, 1993. Part of a diary I used to keep while in college. A little bit about getting my first job, several rants about physics classes, and a whole lot of whiny obsessions about a girl who I never actually managed to… well, whatever it was I thought I wanted to accomplish. I had no clue. Still don’t, really.
A Logo program from 1982 is the oldest document that remains on the computer. I’m not sure what it does anymore, but I think it spells my name.
The oldest files I have that I created are about that age, but on tape, and incompatable with IBM.
Real files – not source files created by someone else in the 1970s that subsequently became incorporated into the Unix routines of MacOS X, but stuff that I myself created –
“financial aid tirade” and “Adultishness”, two newspaper columns written in MacWrite 4.6 for my undergrad newspaper in 1986.
That’s about right. I didn’t learn how to use a computer until fall of 1986.
I have a copy of the Magna Carta on my computer, which was written almost 800 years ago.
I have chapters of my second Star Trek novel kicking around, dating back to April, 1988.
I’ve got seven files dated 01/01/1980,the oldest of which is named Well23 (no extension) and it appears to be an ascii velocity function. I’ll be damned if I remember creating it and, since Explorer refuses to take a date earlier than that (a DOS legacy limitation?), that date seems suspect.
The oldest stuff I remember are some BASIC programs and text files from my early forays into synthetic modeling in 1986.
If the file was created on a machine whose CMOS battery had gone dead, the computer would have defaulted to this date and attached it to your file.
I have e-mails dating back from a few years… When I went back and looked after seeing this thread I noticed that there is an e-mail I thought I had deleted (after breaking the monitor, keyboard and losing the mouseball).
An e-mail that my old gf broke up with me in.
That was deleted VERY quickly after it was found today.
Besides that, only a few programs that I moved over from an old pc. The games in them are technically files I created, so those are at least from the mid 90’s.
I have a copy of the Old Testament on mine, which is several thousand years old.
Oldest file, one from July 2001, as all files before that were destroyed when my computer crashed and I had to erase the hard drive.
That I made, probably since about 1997 or so. But my Linux partition apparently believes my Windows partition was created in 1969. I don’t think I’m going to correct it 
Bryan Ekers, a curiousity question. I suspected that file date stamp was some kind of bogus default - would a CMOS battery lapse also give them all a similar (say 12:00 AM) time stamp, as well? I ask because the time stamps are different for all of the 01/01/1980 files.
The oldest file I could find stored on my present system has a date of 04/02/1992. It’s a PCX screen capture of a game. If the OP will allow for files stored on floppies as opposed to on the hard drive, I have a box of 5¼" floppies collecting dust on my shelf. I got my first IBM-compatible in November of 1991 and I know I must have a few files on those disks that were created once and never updated. I also know I have some BASIC programs I wrote on the Timex/Sinclair 2068 stored on a cassette tape now sitting in one of my junk drawers. I must have created these programs around 1985-1986.
Ringo, longtime DOS users can confirm this: sometimes when you booted up your IBM XT, it would ask you to set the date and time. Oftentimes, you didn’t care and just hit ENTER twice. This would set the date at 01/01/1980 and the time to 0000 (i.e. 12 a.m.) The clock and date would run normally as long as your machine was powered up, so if you played around for an hour and then saved a file, that file would have a 1 a.m. timestamp. If you left the machine on overnight, the date would change.
The way to fix this was to change your clock battery (not to be confused with the mighty 4.77MHz CPU clock) so the machine could keep an accurate timing on its own and stop bugging you on bootup.
Ot just upgrade to an AT with an awesome 20Mhz CPU and up to 16 megabytes of memory.
addresses.txt was created 12th January 1993. It contains the names and addresses of all my friends and relatives, and must have lived on about 50 different computers during its time.
However, I have a tape somewhere in my attic that contains a text-based adventure game (“Legacy of the Minotaur” - totally atrocious, inspired by a holiday in Crete) I wrote in 1983.