Code archaeology queries

Posted Jun 22, 2017 20:27 UTC (Thu) by DSpinellis (guest, #116958)
In reply to: Code archaeology queries by epa
Parent article: Assembling the history of Unix

Git can provide the answer with git blame, but it takes many hours to run this command on the whole repository. The oldest surviving piece of code in a 2016 version of FreeBSD Unix was probably written by Dennis Ritchie on 1979-01-10 in the file usr/src/libc/gen/timezone.c. You can see the code in Figure 6 in the article A Repository of Unix History and Evolution1 .

Code archaeology queries

Posted Jun 23, 2017 13:45 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Again, though, this has run up against the resolution limits of the technique. In the same article we have changes by Ken Thompson in usr/sys/sys/pipe.c at 1979-01-10 15:19:35. Does anyone really believe this was written twenty minutes after the stuff in timezone.c? The dates come from the dates on tarballs, dates from Peter Salus, dates on ancient tapes, even dates scribbled on random ancient printouts. (An amazing achievement!)