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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

Not on Git, but I was curious and grepped through the Siemens S7 repository I maintain at work; we've been using the same comment practice since forever, with the date in ISO8601 format. (Since before ISO 8601 even was a thing!)

Oldest I found?

1986-06-17: Trygve glemte å sjekke om vi deler på null. Fikset.

(Trygve forgot to check whether we divide by zero. Fixed.)

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Yep. Huge limitation of this approach is the assumption the code has always lived in the same VCS. I remember migrating a monorepo for geointelligence processing algorithms years back to multiple repos, and its own history was it had been in Mercurial before Git, ClearCase before Mercurial, and God knows what earlier than that. But I was reviewing old Fortran code for handling specific vehicle missions and could see from the mission codes that some of these were satellites launched in the late 80s, so the code itself had to be even older than that.

Incredible. This is like Graffiti from Pompeii.

You've got me beat... at a previous job, there were comments from 1991 complaining about how it was ported/rewritten from cobol.

Ported to what?

Oracle Pro*C. You don't want to know.

I’ve never even heard of this before. Talk about old-school!

I forgot it existed, was using it at a couple of jobs circa 1989-1992. Completely blocked it out of my mind.

A former job had a similarly old codebase. I made the mistake of asking where the docs were and someone pulled out this typewritten booklet of yellowed pages from 1981 that was the only remaining copy of the originals in the early 70s.

The code was on at least its 4th language by that point and is probably still running robots today.

Ugh. That is sooo Trygve.

Don't be too hard on him. For sufficiently large values of zero, you don't really need to check...

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