Ask HN: What's the oldest publicly-available repo with different versions?

[andrewxhonson]

What is the oldest collection of code out there, including different versions of the same project, where someone could access it and compare the changes between versions to get a sense of what changed?

By publicly-available, I mean where it is made available for anyone who requested it to somehow access it (e.g. from the internet, from a library).

With "repo," I'm not imagining it using version-control software per se, just that it could be compared and clearly show some kind of iteration of the same piece of code.

[e3bc54b2]

Emacs source code goes quite far back, with extensive changelog between every 2 functions, if you don't fancy rifling through commit log itself: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/

Earliest commit is from 1985: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?h=emacs-...

Log starting from 1985: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?h=emacs-19....

[eesmith]

The Python source - https://github.com/python/cpython/ - with full commit history back to 1990.

The Unix source - https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo - with quite a number of releases dating back to 1970.

[andrewxhonson]

Had no idea the Unix source was out there, very cool. Weird to see "53 years ago" on GitHub. Thanks!