I can't quite recall when electrum released its first version. As a rule, I don't believe everything I hear on the internet. the seed is from feb 2011. I can't remember what wallet created the mnemonic. could have been bitcoin-core or electrum or mabye another one. I cant accurately rememebr, 10 years ago.
Bitcore Core has never used mnemonics as a wallet recovery/backup option. It has always been "make a copy of wallet.dat" file. So you can safely rule that one out.
I linked to
ThomasV (the original developer of Electrum) announcing Electrum in November of 2011... so, if you are 100% certain that your seed is from Feb 2011, then you can be 100% certain that it is not an Electrum seed either.
And all I found was like 30 lines of code on that link. I need a electrum version 0.3 or before like 0.2 but I am not a programmer and can't compile complex programs. I need a complete wallet file as an executable or for use with python.
I'm not sure there was ever a "compiled" version of these old versions... or if they had to be run from source with Python.
This link gives you all the code for 0.29:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/tree/c28190c45e8bf9c44b84e7d1f59d6d5df41a81c5but it seems you may have just tried to open the setup.py... as I mentioned, you need to click the "Code" -> "Download ZIP" option to download the full archive... then extract it... you can then run:
python setup.py
or go into the "client" folder and try:
python electrum.py
You'll probably run into a whole bunch of problems with missing modules and/or outdated modules
Attempting to get 10 year old python code running is going to be an exercise in frustration I would think.
After a lot of dicking around with getting PyGTK, ecdsa and slowaes installed on Ubuntu 18, I got as far as having it ask if I wanted to create a new wallet, prompting for a server address... and then it would promptly crash with an "unable to decode byte at position X" type error. A skeleton "electrum.dat" file would be created... not sure if the random looking hex string in it is the seed though... it's certainly not 12 words.
In any case, as stated above, if you are 100% sure that seed is from February 2011 (I assume your piece of paper is dated?
), then I would be willing to bet that it isn't an Electrum seed anyway.