After all that flap about having moved GCC into GIT I thought it would be worth checking out, you know digging for interesting old artifacts.
I found the ‘start’ back over here on github:

Sadly the ‘initial revisions’ only contain a few files, far from the contents of the ’87 archive.
Pitty.
Not that I would envy anyone crazy enough to do such a thing, I was just hoping someone else would have done a better job than I did.
unix.superglobalmegacorp.com getting 503 Service Unavailable.
I guess I got myself ddosed. I restarted the instance and it’s up.
alright it is working now, thanks.
and their git is converted from svn and earliest rev dated in 1988-11-23 vs earliest change in ChangeLog dated 1988-01-09 (gnu c 1.17), so either older changes are not in RCS or they get lost between VCS changes/migration.
but still not the earliest as gnu c 0.9 dated 1987-03-22.
I thought it was interesting that nobody looks at the first commit and even asks if it makes any sense at all… Not that I could imagine a massive project like this, but I wonder how much stuff was left out.
Kind of sad how opensoftware quickly loses it’s history.