Portraits of Famous Files

A collection of portraits of culturally and historically significant digital entities

001 snowden-archive

All 474 leaked NSA (National Security Agency) documents made public by Edward Snowden in June, 2013.

002 SETUP32.EXE

America Online 3.0’s SETUP32.EXE, which was sent to hundreds of thousands of American households on CD-ROM throughout the 1990s

003 Legend of Zelda, The (U) (PRG1) [!].nes

Original Legend of Zelda game for 8-bit Nintendo, released in the U.S. on February 21, 1986

004 proposal.html

Tim Berners-Lee’s Information Management: A Proposal, published in March, 1989, laid the theoretical foundations for the modern internet.

005 Apollo-11

Code NASA wrote for the Command and Lunar Modules on the Apollo 11 mission, which landed people on the moon for the first time in 1969

006 bitcoin.pdf

Bitcoin white paper, written pseudonymous by Satoshi Nakimato in 2008

007 mainnet.json

The Ethereum blockchain’s genesis block, which launched on July 30th, 2015

008 the-declaration-of-independence-of-the-united-states-of-america-by-thomas-jefferson.txt

The first ebook, The Declaration of Independence, digitized by Michael S. Hart for Project Gutenberg in 1971

009 Microsoft MS-DOS 1.25 [CDP OEM R2.11] and Basic (5.25).7z

MS-DOS 1.25 was Microsoft’s first general purpose operating system for public consumption, released in April 1982

010 1.svg

CrypoPunk #1, the first in a series of 10,000 that inspired the ERC-721 standard on which all NFTs are based

011 Nyan Cat! [Official].mp4

Nyan Cat captured the spirit of the Internet in the early 2010s; animated by Chris Torres

012 master-pnp-ppbd-00300-00358u.tif

Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait is the first to be taken with a digital camera; photographed by Pete Souza

013 1968 “Mother of All Demos” by SRI’s Doug Engelbart and Team.mp4

Recorded demo by Douglas Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute showcasing a computer mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing, multiple-user document editing, multiple windows, and networking; December 9, 1968

014 quantum-Frame000.tif–quantum-Frame178.tif

Quantum, an animated gif consisting of 178 frames by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, is widely considered the world’s first NFT. It was minted on the Namecoin blockchain on May 3, 2014.

015 Netscape Navigator 9.0.0.6.exe

The last version of Netscape Navigator to be released before officially losing the “Browser Wars” of the 1990s to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer

016 IE 6.0 Full

No other browser in internet history attained more market share than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, despite being noncompliant with web standards and prone to security flaws

017 Me at the zoo.mp4

First video uploaded to YouTube, by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, on April 23, 2005

018 craigslist_ new york jobs, apartments, for sale, services, community, and events.html

Craigslist.org’s homepage, whose design has remained the same since 2000

019 RANSOMWARE-WANNACRY-2.0

Launched in May, 2017, WannaCry infected over 230,000 Windows computers and caused billions in damages, making it one of the most harmful computer viruses ever released

020 tumblr_nkcjuq8Tdr1tnacy1o1_500.jpg

Everyone on the Internet in 2015 had an opinion on whether “the dress” was black and blue or white and gold, making it one of the first memes to achieve worldwide virality