

“Committed on 22 May 1981” - galapago
https://github.com/mist64/msdos1/commit/16d08abe4ff316cc621db1301896a32bec689fb7

======
geofft
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...](https://github.com/mit-
athena/discuss/commit/207670ad8bf752b21f73c7971d61cab2b96d4a21)

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](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).

~~~
chton
It's very comforting to see commit messages like [https://github.com/mit-
athena/discuss/commit/6359a0ae817ddda...](https://github.com/mit-
athena/discuss/commit/6359a0ae817dddadce88bcc82a0a161eb046d141) and
[https://github.com/mit-
athena/discuss/commit/911e5877bf2e9cc...](https://github.com/mit-
athena/discuss/commit/911e5877bf2e9cca0f8756961345a8732deeb88f), even from as
far back as '86\. Developers have occasionally felt stupid and unmotivated for
a loooong time :)

------
teh
go has a commit from 1972: [http://bit.ly/1sYa7qR](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](https://blog.wearewizards.io/first-commits)

~~~
dribnet
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](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.

~~~
codyps
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.

------
tomphoolery
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.

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

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

IBMBIO.COM became io.sys.

IBMDOS.COM became msdos.sys.

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

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

