I have some floppy disks from the early 90s which likely still work if I had a reader for them.

The oldest file I have available on my hdd right now that I made is an .XM (FastTracker 2) song I made I copied off a floppy a while ago, that’s from 1995. Sadly there was a lot more where that came from but I lost them all in an HDD crash some time ago. I have a lot of older text files.

Based on file modification dates, it’s this drunken cow:

It’s from October 2004. Initially I doodled it in my lab notebook; back then I was a Chemistry freshman, and I always doodled my stuff like this. Then I redid it in a computer.

(Her name is Vaquetila. Vaca = cow, etila = ethyl.)

Somewhere I have an image of a floppy disk containing the source and compiled version of a program I wrote for a Chaos Theory class in college in 1992.

It’s a double pendulum simulator. Written in Turbo Pascal for MS Dos.

I wrote a rudimentary window management library for it. It had multiple panels for input and display. One panel allowed you to set the initial parameters for the pendulum (lengths, weights, position). One displayed the pendulum, there were a couple that displayed different graphs of the motion.

The last time I ran it was in the mid 2000’s.

My mother’s writings, in WordStar 4.0. Took some research to open and read them decently today.

Astonishing enough some old fart in love with WordStar not only created all the necessary conversion tools but even packaged WordStar 7 (the last existing release) so that it can be used today.

Edit: to put this in context, WordStar 4 used to run on an IBM compatible 8086 4.7Mhz PC, with wopping 640kb ram and 5.25 floppy disks. We already had an hard drive, some 16mb (iirc) beast that took two full 5.25 bay slots and was driven via MF/RL analog signals or something similar

I’ve got some 3.5 inch diskettes with among others some drawings I made in the early 90s as a kid when paint on windows 3.11 seemed like a game to me. made with a mouse and without artistic talent of course

I created? I have pics from 2001 or so that are currently on my computer.

I also have various cds of shareware and game copies from mid 90s that are in a binder.

• 1993 reading notes on Plato’s Republic (Word 5.5 or 6? I can’t remember, it was on a Mac).
• 1 scanned class picture from 1979 or 1978 (the scan was made in the mid to late 90s).

I still have some nudie pics I downloaded from usenet in the early nineties. You had to download the uuencoded parts , stitch them together in an editor and then undecode them. Then the JPEG viewer took about a minute to display the image on a Windows PC with a 386 processor.

dodgeball.exe, a Shockwave Flash game (from before Flash was bought by Adobe) downloaded from the Cartoon Network website in 1996, where you play as Deedee and throw dodgeballs at Dexter from Dexter’s Lab.

I’ve got a couple of files from the '80s originally created with AppleWorks. I can open some of them with LibreOffice (yay for opensource!), for some of the others I have to use Sheepshaver (Mac OS 9 emulator). I keep them for nostalgia reasons.

I have the first song I ever torrented, purely for nostalgia. It’s been transferred over at least six computers and for a time, existed only on a flash drive that I originally found in a parking lot and kept.

The song? DC-10 by Audio Adrenaline. My mom overheard it and banned it from the house for being too violent. It was also the first time I paid attention to airplane platforms. Decades later, I work in aerospace and have done minor projects on the 747 and the KC-10 (extended tanker version of the DC-10 for military in-flight refueling).

The lyrics are pure 1990s Christian “punk”.

I have the 5¼" floppies with my first programming projects in BASIC for the Commodore64. Not sure if those are still readable, but I also have a bunch of games I made in ZZT in the previous millennium.

An early diary txt file I would email to myself as a safe off site storage approach.

I still have some texts that I wrote on the home computer on Windows 3.1. That stuff is probably 25 years old now.