It's probably an import from an early VCS for, as you say, novelty's sake. They don't seemed to be connected to another other history (although it's very hard to tell. Genuine question: why are github's revision visualisation tools so shoddy? Getting from 'here is a checkin' to 'show me the history of one specific file' seems far too hard...)
Here's one of my repos: http://first-commit.com/davidgiven/ack
First checkin 1984. That's real history, too; those files, or their descendants, are still in the current snapshot. Incidentally, not only does that commit predate git, or the SVN repository I converted it from, but it predates CVS itself... I've seen suggestions that the pile of shell scripts which became CVS was actually written for that project!
Not my code, I should add, I'm just looking after it. It's Andy Tanenbaum and Cerial Jacobs' compiler toolchain, the Amsterdam Compiler Kit. Portable, platform independent ANSI & K&R C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam and Algol-68 development kit, complete with linkers, assemblers and libc...