It seems you didn't actually find the very first save :P, or even come anywhere close

As far as I know, id:1 is the first save on this server. It is very suspicious that there is a huge amount of empty space around it though, so it is impossible to say what really happened. Maybe it was added later for some reason as id:1. I wasn't around back then. The reason the date says "Nov 2012" is because that is the date it was last updated. @marbdy randomly came back one day and updated the save, he was surprised he had the very first save. Doing that "unbroke" the date so it stopped saying 1969/1970 after that.


"vacuum cleaner" is definitely not any older. All those saves you see were actually created much later! That ancient version of TPT queries a different server for saves. This other server server was down for a long time, so Skylark one day decided to put some stuff in there to respond to the old api, so that the original versions of TPT would show something in the save browser. He never finished it though, which is why you can't open the saves. There was also once a save called "penis pump" ... but I asked him to delete it after he changed the username to jacob1.

Going back even further, we can look at the saves on the "different server" I mentioned earlier. Sklyark had a backup of it, and he gave that backup to @jacksonmj. jacksonmj put it up here: http://powdertoythings.co.uk/OldPowder/Saves/Search.html
You can search the very first TPT saves there, from around 2008. This was before Simon took over the game. Just a warning though, there were no moderators back then. There is a lot of offensive content on there. We deleted a few that were most visible (top of by votes / by date), but there is definitely bad stuff in there.
If you'd like to browse the old saves in an actual TPT client, see here: http://powdertoythings.co.uk/OldPowder/ There's also much more info in there.

Now for the actual oldest saves. The earlier save on that server was http://powdertoythings.co.uk/OldPowder/Saves/16.html
All the saves before that were deleted. But id:12 was actually found here: http://powdertoythings.co.uk/OldPowder/OrphanedSaves/12

Every save on this server is newer than the saves on the old server. But on this server, ID:1 really is the oldest save as far as I know. It was updated later but that doesn't make any newer, it still was created back in 2010.

I don't know why there are so many empty holes in the IDs, presumably they were deleted, yes. Or corrupted.