Sdate is from 1993 of course

This post is a Human Research-type post - it answers a question the internet can't answer - but it's interesting enough I figured I'd blog about it. The question is how old sdate, the famous program that would say that today is still Eternal September (September 11625, 1993), is.

You might try going to GitHub and finding the oldest commit first. It's from October 16, 2004... but it says "[svn-inject] Installing original source of sdate" so it clearly existed before then.

You might also try looking through the sources for a copyright notice. Turns out it's all © 1993. Unhelpful.

At this point, we have to start looking for other sources. I got Claude Code to do some research, and it found:

• Sdate is based on fakeroot, created in 1997. Its code has copyright notices to 1997, and there were discussions about it on September 6, 1997.
• Sdate is created by Christoph Berg. He's explained his timeline, from which we can infer that he was born ~1977, got the callsign DG8VD in December 1994, and got the callsign DF7CB in October 1995. He would be just ~16 during Eternal September.

But that's all evidence that it had to be created past 1997. That doesn't stop it from being created ~October 2004 though. What if the original date was still correct? It turns out that if you keep looking, the evidence actually says so. The apt changelog shows release 0.1 as from October 15, 2004, and if you go to debian/copyright, it notes the first package was built on the same day (although written as September 4063, 1993).

Now we haven't found when development started, so I'm not comfortable with saying "sdate started on this date". Actually - I take that back. I know when sdate started. A day in September 1993.