"Amazing... you've been recording the order for that long.... wow."

well, way back in the day we were pretty (even more?) clueless, so we kept track of very little. however, since we kept around each piece an artist made, as the original jpg/gif, it just so happens that *the file system* was doing the work for us, and kept the timestamp on the file! in other words, much of the old data was reconstructed (and put into the database) from the date/time on the individual piece files.

needless to say, there were some problems, due to things like backups from other sources, file changes after-the-fact, sloppy copying, etc etc. so that is why the old data can get faulty. </geek>