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:
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 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.
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...
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.
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).