Old Files
Old Files
[Cross-sectional view of what look vaguely like stratigraphic layers underground. A crevice leads down through these concentric layers to a cave-like cavity in the middle, where Cueball is going through the deepest, most central, and incidentally smallest of the files. Above, Megan stands at "ground level", looking down into the crevice.]
Megan: You OK down there?
Documents (47 GB) misc.txt Video projects Old desktop (12 GB) Facebook pics Pics from other camera Temp Misc PDFs MP3 Recovered from drive crash (4 GB) Temp Work misc Audio books My Documents (570 MB) Downloads Kazaa shared AYB EV Override Angband GIFs FIGHT CLUB.wmv Elasto Mania AIM Direct Connect files 4chan ICQ logs High school Zip disk (94 MB) Korn MIDI Photos3 (Prom) lovenote.txt Gorilla.bas Dream.txt James.txt AOL (Citadel) QBasic NYET Jokes.txt AAAFILES (9.4 MB) TXT (850 K) Cueball (deep inside the AAAFILES section looking at his txt files): Oh my god. I wrote poetry .

This comic came out the day after Sky News published the story of original Andy Warhol artwork, created in 1985 on an Amiga 1000 , which was recovered from recently found floppy disks.
Cueball is shown literally digging through a pile of old files; which is a metaphor for looking through old files on his computer. The layers of the pile are arranged much like geological rock formations where older strata are deeper down than younger layers. The files are in concentric layers because each directory is embedded in the previous directory. Therefore, the "Documents" folder contains an "Old Desktop" folder, which contains a folder with files recovered from an older system, which itself contains a "My Documents" folder, which contains a folder with files copied from a Zip Disk from high school. The result is that files from high school have survived in his present-day machine. These older folders serve as a time capsule of sorts, storing old files from AOL , NYET, and Kazaa . These files are meant to be analogous to the fossils and artifacts found in lower, older rock layers.
The sizes of the files decrease as Cueball goes deeper, since data storage has gotten cheaper over time. When the Zip Drive first came out, it cost $200 USD (plus $20 per 100 MB floppy). As of 2019, $200 could buy you at least an 8 TB portable external hard drive. In the 1990s, during AOL's heyday, 10+ GB hard drives were prohibitively expensive and a terabyte of data was unimaginable to most users.
Deep down, Cueball discovers several files he is surprised about, including a poetry file which embarrasses him as he does not remember writing poetry.
In the title text, he mentions also finding an " Animorphs Novel", which may be a text copy of one of the original books or a fan fiction of the Animorphs series (his reaction of quickly eradicating it may either be to prevent him being caught with a presumably-illegal copy of an Animorphs book or as a result of embarrassment at his fan fiction - the former is less likely than the latter considering some of the other files mentioned, so it is most likely a fan fiction). The series was released between 1996 and 2001, consistent with the fact that these files were created during Cueball/ Randall's high school years. The series was extremely popular at the time. Animorphs has already been mentioned in the title text of 1187: Aspect Ratio , and later it was the main joke in 1380: Manual for Civilization and 1817: Incognito Mode .
The folders and files in detail:
Documents (47 GB): A large folder containing many of Cueball 's personal files.
Old desktop (12 GB): A backup from a former computer.
Recovered from drive crash (4 GB): When a hard drive crashes, some or all data may be recovered.
My Documents (570 MB): Windows XP user accounts came with a "My Documents" folder that was widely used for storing personal files. The items in this archive came from the era when Windows XP was popular.
High school Zip disk (94 MB): The most popular form of superfloppy , introduced in 1994 with a capacity of 100 MB.
AAAFILES (9.4 MB): Some of Cueball 's oldest documents, likely prefixed with "AAA" to put the folder at the top of an alphabetically-sorted list.
TXT (850 K): Old text files, which include poetry he didn't remember writing.
[Cross-sectional view of what look vaguely like stratigraphic layers underground. A crevice leads down through these concentric layers to a cave-like cavity in the middle, where Cueball is going through the deepest, most central, and incidentally smallest of the files. Above, Megan stands at "ground level", looking down into the crevice.]
Megan: You OK down there?
Documents (47 GB) misc.txt Video projects Old desktop (12 GB) Facebook pics Pics from other camera Temp Misc PDFs MP3 Recovered from drive crash (4 GB) Temp Work misc Audio books My Documents (570 MB) Downloads Kazaa shared AYB EV Override Angband GIFs FIGHT CLUB.wmv Elasto Mania AIM Direct Connect files 4chan ICQ logs High school Zip disk (94 MB) Korn MIDI Photos3 (Prom) lovenote.txt Gorilla.bas Dream.txt James.txt AOL (Citadel) QBasic NYET Jokes.txt AAAFILES (9.4 MB) TXT (850 K) Cueball (deep inside the AAAFILES section looking at his txt files): Oh my god. I wrote poetry .
