The Original Gorgan: A 26-Year-Old Identity and the Floppy Disk That Proves It
Someone started calling themselves 'RealGorgan' recently. Here's how a 26-year-old floppy disk proves I've been Gorgan since 1999.
Preface
I recently stumbled across someone using the handle "RealGorgan" online.
The irony wasn't lost on me. Someone claiming to be the "real" version of a name I've used for over 26 years. At first, I didn't think much of it. Names get reused. People have similar ideas. The internet is a big place.
But it kept nagging at me. Not out of anger, but curiosity. In a world where anyone can claim anything, where digital identities can be fabricated with a few keystrokes, how do you actually prove you were there first?
TL;DR
Someone started using "RealGorgan" about two years ago
I've been using "Gorgan" since November 11, 1999 in Ultima Online
I still have the original 3.5" floppy disk with screenshots from 1999
I created a forensic disk image that preserves the original FAT12 filesystem timestamps
The evidence is cryptographically verifiable
Download the forensic disk image and verify it yourself
The Challenge
When you tell someone you've been using a name since 1999, what evidence can you provide?
Screenshots? Anyone can edit a JPEG.
File timestamps? Those change every time you copy a file.
Old forum posts? Most forums from 1999 don't exist anymore, and those that do have been migrated through multiple database systems, losing metadata along the way.
Web archives? The Wayback Machine is great, but it didn't archive everything, and a personal gaming handle wouldn't have been on public websites anyway.
In the age of deepfakes, AI-generated content, and digital manipulation, proving digital provenance is surprisingly difficult. You need something that can't be faked. Something with cryptographic integrity. Something physical.
But here's the thing: I had something better than any of that.
I remembered I had a floppy disk with something on it that could help!
The Evidence
The year was 1999. Dial-up internet. The satisfying screech of a 56k modem connecting. And Ultima Online, one of the first massively multiplayer online RPGs to exist.
That year I created a character named Gorgan and spent countless hours in that pixelated fantasy world. I was so proud of my character that I took screenshots and saved them to a 3.5" floppy disk. Because that's what you did in 1999. Cloud storage wasn't a thing. Social media didn't exist. You saved your digital memories to physical media and hoped the disk didn't get corrupted.
My character Gorgan in Ultima Online, November 11, 1999
You might notice the first screenshot has some distortion at the bottom. That's not damage from age or a corrupted file. It was like that in the original screenshot for some reason. Maybe a glitch in the game's screenshot function, maybe something with my ancient video card. Either way, it's been there since 1999, preserved exactly as it was captured.
Another shot from the same day
That floppy disk sat in a drawer for over two decades. I forgot about it. Life moved on. The internet evolved. But the name stuck with me. Gorgan became my handle everywhere, from chatrooms and forums to GitHub and professional profiles.
Years later, while playing on UO Gamers: Hybrid (a free Ultima Online shard), someone impersonated my character. In response, I started adding "The Real" prefix to all my character names. It was a defensive move, a way to distinguish myself from the impostor. Eventually, "The Real Gorgan" became another variation I used interchangeably with just "Gorgan."
The irony isn't lost on me that now, decades later, someone else has adopted "RealGorgan" as their handle. History repeating itself, but this time with the roles reversed.
And when I saw it, I knew exactly where to find my proof.
The Investigation
I dug through old storage boxes and found it. A dusty 3.5" floppy disk with "UO Screenshots" scrawled on the label in permanent marker. My handwriting from 1999.
Using a USB floppy drive (yes, they still make those), I didn't just copy the files off the disk. I created a complete forensic disk image of the entire floppy, capturing every single byte including the filesystem metadata that contains the original timestamps from when the files were created.
The result: a 1.44 MB disk image file that's a perfect snapshot of that floppy disk as it existed 26 years ago.
Download the forensic disk image (1.44 MB)
What the Disk Reveals
The floppy uses an old filesystem called FAT12, which stores the exact date and time each file was created. This metadata is embedded in the raw disk structure itself and can't be faked without changing the entire disk image, which would completely alter its cryptographic fingerprint.
When you examine the disk image, you'll find two JPEG files:
UO0002.JPG: Created November 11, 1999 at 5:04:08 PM
UO0006.JPG: Created November 11, 1999 at 5:07:40 PM
These aren't "modified" dates that could be changed by copying files around. These are the original creation timestamps as written by Windows 98 or Windows ME in 1999, stored in the FAT12 directory structure.
The Digital Fingerprints
To prove nothing has been tampered with, here are the SHA-256 hashes (digital fingerprints) of everything:
Disk Image:
gorgan_floppy_1999.img
SHA-256: a49f14c99d947a902da7ddd1536d11fe53d010e3cbb84c81c0e356a9dda64331
Screenshots:
UO0002.JPG
SHA-256: fdf4174a9f0cf9bfc0be5c5660644e8bab6ecbe50983d1caf7ebae00a08cea7f
UO0006.JPG
SHA-256: 11ab252c3217ede84e7d48a8b75ac2c3a9cf726ecf4ffd129a30013971855ad5
If even a single bit were different, these fingerprints would be completely different. The integrity is verifiable.
The Verdict
Looking at these screenshots now, I'm hit with a wave of nostalgia. The chunky pixel art. The isometric view. The simple joy of exploring a virtual world when the concept of "virtual worlds" was still new and exciting.
Ultima Online was more than just a game. It was where a generation of us learned about online communities, digital identities, and the strange new frontier of living part of your life on the internet. We were pioneers in a way, figuring out who we wanted to be in digital spaces before those spaces became as real and important as physical ones.
And somewhere in that journey, I became Gorgan. Not because I was trying to build a brand or claim a namespace. Just because I needed a name, and that one felt right.
In a world where digital identity matters more than ever, where your online presence can be as important as your offline one, this floppy disk is more than just nostalgia. It's a time capsule from the early internet, preserved in magnetic oxide on a plastic disk, containing cryptographic evidence that anyone with basic technical knowledge can verify.
The Record
I'm not writing this to start a fight with whoever is using "RealGorgan" now. Maybe they didn't know. Maybe they thought the name was available. Maybe they have their own reasons.
But the record should be clear:
The name Gorgan has been mine since November 11, 1999.
Before MySpace. Before Facebook. Before Twitter. Before GitHub. Before "RealGorgan."
Twenty-six years later, it still is.
For the Technically Curious
If you want to verify the timestamps yourself, you can mount the disk image on Linux, Mac, or Windows. The modification dates are stored at offset 0x2600 in the disk image, in the root directory entries.
Mounting on Linux/Mac
# Download the image
wget https://gorgan.dev/user/themes/gorgan/images/gorgan_floppy_1999.img
# Mount it (Linux)
sudo mkdir /mnt/floppy
sudo mount -o loop,ro gorgan_floppy_1999.img /mnt/floppy
ls -la /mnt/floppy
# Mac
hdiutil attach -readonly gorgan_floppy_1999.img
You should see the two JPEG files with November 11, 1999 timestamps.
Mounting on Windows
Windows doesn't natively support mounting raw floppy disk images, but you can use the free ImDisk Toolkit:
Download and install ImDisk Toolkit
Right-click the
gorgan_floppy_1999.imgfileSelect "Mount as ImDisk Virtual Disk"
Choose a drive letter and click OK
Open the mounted drive in File Explorer
Right-click on the JPEG files and select Properties to view the creation dates
The timestamps will show as November 11, 1999.
About the FAT12 Format
The disk uses the standard FAT12 format used by 1.44MB floppy disks in the 1990s. The date encoding uses a 16-bit format where bits 0-4 are the day, bits 5-8 are the month, and bits 9-15 are the year offset from 1980.
For UO0002.JPG, the raw date word is 0x2796, which decodes to November 11, 1999.
Download the disk image and verify it yourself. The evidence is all there.
