What does HackerNews think of unix-history-repo?

> The “why” goes into the PR …

This just ensures that the “why” is lost when someone comes looking years later.

From experience, SCM history is far more durable than just about any other work product we produce.

Over five decades later, commit history was still available for the Unix sources and could be reconstructed: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

I’ve used 35-year-old commit messages to help understand a long-standing issue, decades after all other related organization tooling and data had disappeared.

And here's a (big!) project that aims to reconstruct a complete source history from the current FreeBSD all the way back to 1970 Unix.

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

Not a repo, may be one somewhere though:

http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php

(Considered buying Coherent way back in the day)

There is an empty repo by this name in your project so I'm a bit confused whether this one is supposed to be included:

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo is a project that attempts to document Unix from its very first line all the way up to FreeBSDs HEAD (at least whenever it's imported, which might only be once a year). There's even a gource video showing the evolution.

Is the source history of these editors saved in the UNIX history GitHub project[1]? Is there significant code overlap or is your diagram more along the lines of inspired-by relationships?

[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

That's how the Unix History Repository was built, at least (a really cool project that reconstructed a synthetic git commit history for Unix from the initial Bell Labs source onward):

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make (a repo with the scripts to build the final repo)

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo (the final repo -- check out all of the different branches/tags)

I was curious what the oldest reference of it was,

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo.git

has different branches for various unix versions

Seems the earliest reference I could find in there was dated november 1973, but it is from a full import in 77:

commit c849507974bd2c0e2fd8c17e06f6f65b68075ca9 Author: Bill Joy Date: Wed Nov 23 12:43:50 1977 -0800

    Start development on BSD 1
    Create reference copy of all prior development files
    
    
    Synthesized-from: 1bsd

Some of the earlier copies i can see were even just shell scripts:

  trap "" 1 15
  if test -t 2>&1  ; then
	  echo "Sending output to 'nohup.out'"
	  exec nice -5 $* >>nohup.out 2>&1
  else
  	exec nice -5 $* 2>&1
  fi

Research-V3-Snapshot-Development did not have nohup Research-V4-Snapshot-Development had the nohup man page but not nohup Research-V5-Snapshot-Development has nohup.c

commit 0281f55d1cf7aa94555d8522d8b37161b97791be Author: Ken Thompson Date: Tue Nov 26 18:13:21 1974 -0500

    Research V5 development
    Work on file usr/source/s2/nohup.c
    
    Co-Authored-By: Dennis Ritchie 
    Synthesized-from: v5

Then later v7 reverted back to the shell version

commit 6144d5b3a973b515977eef01a828cdd82c480fe3 Author: Ken Thompson Date: Wed Jan 10 15:25:04 1979 -0500

    Research V7 development
    Work on file bin/nohup
    
    Co-Authored-By: Dennis Ritchie 
    Synthesized-from: v7

I would look in the git repository for Unix: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo. It isn't guaranteed to be correct, either, but should have a commit describing its addition that can be trusted slightly more.

The earlier i can find there without digging deep is BSD 4.4 Lite, a mega-commit by Rodney Grimes (https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/commit/d2273...)

Being an enormous commit, changes are that it merged in existing stuff.