“Committed on 22 May 1981” | Hacker News Reader

“Committed on 22 May 1981”

github.com

64 pointsgalapago15 comments

Yeah, but that's clearly after-the-fact. :) Here's the oldest commit in Discuss, the conferencing system written for Project Athena:

https://github.com/mit-athena/discuss/commit/207670ad8bf752b...

That's an actual commit in RCS from 1986, which got imported to CVS, which got imported to SVN, which got imported to git last year. The entire history is now on GitHub:

https://github.com/mit-athena/discuss/commits/master

The codebase is still in use and still developed, although (as you might be able to tell from the recent commits) it's kind of old code. I've got one commit in there replacing a printf(s) with a printf("%s", s).

It's very comforting to see commit messages like https://github.com/mit-athena/discuss/commit/6359a0ae817ddda... and https://github.com/mit-athena/discuss/commit/911e5877bf2e9cc..., even from as far back as '86. Developers have occasionally felt stupid and unmotivated for a loooong time :)

go has a commit from 1972: http://bit.ly/1sYa7qR

We recently had a look at first commits [1]. Most large projects start out as a code dump, so are less interesting.

[1] https://blog.wearewizards.io/first-commits

It's my understanding that - because of obscure constants in the git codebase - it's a bad idea to use dates before Sat, 03 Mar 1973 09:46:40 GMT because the usable git epoch is 1970 + 100000000s. More details available here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=625480

FWIW: I routinely start my git repos with an empty commit to allow history rewrites and use Jan 1st, 1974 as my own epoch.

Pretty sure that bug has since been fixed, I generated a dummy commit with a date of 0 a few months ago.

FYI: git supports rewrites to the implicit root commit with `git rebase --root` (and similar), there isn't a need for an extra empty commit.

How come the first commit for go is from that year? Didn't go appeared around 2007-2008 ?

The file is not written in Go. It appears to be a "hello world". Since all these commits predate their git storage technology, it's a form of back-dating...

It's a homage to b, one of go's ancestors.

how did Git preserve the actual created-at date of the file? I was under the impression that it would log down the date at which you committed the file, but no the date at which the file was actually created.

git-commit lets you set any commit date you please.

you can set up GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables and make a commit object dated how you want for example.

These two files were renamed after Microsoft more or less parted ways with IBM.

IBMBIO.COM became io.sys.

IBMDOS.COM became msdos.sys.

Actually this difference between PC-DOS and MS-DOS has been there from the beginning.

1981 is cool, but you know what's also cool? 3012

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