March 20, 1996. Before that I worked on so many different computers that I didn't manage to keep a continuous archive. Early on, my files would have been on punched cards, then 9-track tape, then 8" floppies, etc. I do have some usenet postings from 1981 that are still viewable. The oldest is here: https://groups.google.com/g/fa.unix-wizards/c/o2fAr_mGPa8/m/... At least I no longer feel I'm "naive in terms of UNIX" as I stated in my posting :)
You probably had a few audio cassettes with data squirts too. I find it intriguing that few people alive today have ever used diskettes, and of those far fewer remember a time when there were crazy-many diskette formats, even on the same medium. Hard sector vs. soft sector. When do you tape over the write protect notch, when you want to write or when you want to protect?
I was always an island computer geek isolated from the mainland (except BBS long di$tance) so we had to start our own commercial ISP in the mid 90s to bring it. My first USENET was a post to alt.flame in September 1994: "Bigfoot! Watch out, boy! They are looking for you in Des Moines. Time to move on. Warning: the Kansas city account is being monitored by professors from the UT Anthropology Dept. Don't use it. Use the Finnish anonymous server through East coast account number 3 to forward new address. Courage, beast."
So there was an MIT Center for Cognitive Science! Did you ever find intelligent life on Earth?
