While working on Repography I've explored a ton of open source Git repos. Recently looking at golang/go, I was amazed to see the first commit appears to be from computing legend Brian Kernighan in July 1972.

commit 7d7c6a97f815e9279d08cfaea7d5efb5e90695a8
Author: Brian Kernighan <bwk>
Date:   Tue Jul 18 19:05:45 1972 -0500

    hello, world

    R=ken
    DELTA=7  (7 added, 0 deleted, 0 changed)

diff --git a/src/pkg/debug/macho/testdata/hello.b b/src/pkg/debug/macho/testdata/hello.b
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..05c4140424
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/pkg/debug/macho/testdata/hello.b
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+main( ) {
+       extrn a, b, c;
+       putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
+} 
+a 'hell';
+b 'o, w';
+c 'orld';

Brian is then hard at work for the next few years:

• Sun Jan 20 01:02:03 1974: convert to C
• Fri Apr 1 02:02:04 1988: convert to Draft-Proposed ANSI C
• Fri Apr 1 02:03:04 1988: last-minute fix: convert to ANSI C

In 1988 the team decided to take a break — for about 20 years — before Robert Griesemer's first commit, Go spec starting point.

It's interesting to note that the file from these early commits (the final ANSI C version) is still in the Go repo today.

I absolutely love that someone took the time to implant this easter egg and that it still endures, in such a prominent project.

Finally, having fiddled with the time range a bit, I rendered the poster I intended to... I think this makes it super clear how the core team has evolved over time. It's also encouraging that several of the top contributors appear to have become involved relatively recently.

I wonder what other easter eggs and interesting stories are hiding in commit histories? If you have any suggestions please let us know.

Update: As mentioned in the discussion on HackerNews, Russ Cox also wrote about this easter egg providing lots of great context.