What is the oldest image online in which the link is not broken?

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

https://www.spacejam.com/

This whole site from 1996 still works!

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.

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/

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

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

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.

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/

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".

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...

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/

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.

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/

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

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.

WWW the project 1992 http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...

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.

"online"? That would be something on a newsgroup, BBS, usenet or public FTP. It wouldn't be something served over HTTP.

This is my 1995 website: http://www.netpoint.be

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.

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...

Are we going to DDoS a historical vestige?

Space Jam's website from originally 1996 is still up: https://www.spacejam.com/

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990504112211im_/http://www.goo...

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 :(

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.

What's the oldest MP3 file still online?

probably goatse dot cx, but I'm not checking