Oldest demo?

There was some debate a while back about what the earliest pwad was.

Now, I've got a Steffen Winterfeldt demo on my HD dated 19-06-1994 (it's an e1m3 nm100s recording). The earliest demo in the DHT archives seems to be an example set done by Frank Stajano, which went up on 12-05-94. And there was the LMP Hall of Fame, which doesn't exist on /idgames anymore, though it might be on a Doom CD pack somewhere (anyone seen this?) It began in January 1994.

Anyone got any earlier examples?

Well I've got tons of lmps dated Jan 1, 1988, just cause my BIOS battery was dead for a couple of months :-))

Not counting these, I've found an E3NS1809.lmp dated April 8, 1994 and FA08-347.lmp dated April 23, 1994. However, I'm pretty sure they were recorded way later and I have no clue why they have such dates.

I'm fairly certain there are some combined with wads that pre-date the 'demo pages'.
but I don't have an example.
I suppose technically, you could say demo1. :D
Edit: I'm very interested to see how this pans out. Myk? Never? Led? PlanetAdam? any input?

Ryback said:

And there was the LMP Hall of Fame, which doesn't exist on /idgames anymore, though it might be on a Doom CD pack somewhere (anyone seen this?) It began in January 1994.

Yes, I've got that, or maybe an early version of it (which is what we're interested in here, after all). I've uploaded it here. The earliest credible date there is 01-Feb-1994.

Opulent said:

I'm fairly certain there are some combined with wads that pre-date the 'demo pages'.

Kneedeep.wad was part of the DEU package, and contained some lmps. That wad is dated 27-Apr-1994, but it wasn't the first version, and AFAIK there is no way to determine the date of the lmps.

RECORD.zip

Donce said:

Not counting these, I've found an E3NS1809.lmp dated April 8, 1994 and FA08-347.lmp dated April 23, 1994. However, I'm pretty sure they were recorded way later and I have no clue why they have such dates.

Hey, those are my demos! They were actually recorded in 2000 sometime, but my computer got confused by the Y2K thing and thought it was 1994...

Ryback said:

Hey, those are my demos! They were actually recorded in 2000 sometime, but my computer got confused by the Y2K thing and thought it was 1994...

Heh, now THAT is really funny :-)

Opulent said:

Myk? Never? Led? PlanetAdam? any input?

I never did anything with demos prior to '98, and don't have any old collected Doom stuff. Sorry. :(

surely the oldest demos would be the ones in the first release of doom.wad

opulent already covered that insight.

I suppose technically, you could say demo1. :D

Anyway, I was looking through an old DOOM add-ons CD I have and I noted that the safest way to determine a demo's date is looking at any accompanying text files; date stamps can be quite misleading as they are sometimes copying dates... I've found files sharing the exact same dates (to the second.) I found a file explaining the beginning of the Hall of Fame in Dicember 1993. I also noted a number of files stating dates in early 1994 in both my CD and the package Grazza uploaded, since they used a template that included the recording date (as in the example I just linked.)

It's doubtful that they would have faked the dates or anything like that.

A very interesting question, though Cyb may have spoiled it with his quick answer <g>. Unfortunately he is right as far as built-in demos go - I'd only add that we're looking as far back as alpha v0.5 (May 1993).
As for user demos, it's much more complicated. A quick look at my archives didn't turn up anything older than what Grazza has. The oldest WAD with an internal demo I found is CORE.WAD by Barry Ferg, dated April 2 1994.