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There's a screenshot purporting to be of GitHub from May 2008. There are tell-tale signs, though, that some or all of the CSS has failed to load, and that that's not really what the site would have looked like if you visited it at the time. Indeed, if you check github.com in the Wayback Machine, you can see that its earliest crawl was May 2008, and it failed to capture the external style sheet, which results in a 404 when you try to load that copy today. Probably best to just not include a screenshot when that happens.

(Although it's especially silly in this case, since accessing that copy[1] in the Wayback Machine reveals that the GitHub website included screenshots of itself that look nothing like the screenshot in this article.)

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20080514210148/http://github.com...>



Author here. That's a good catch, thanks! I've replaced it with a newer screenshot from August 2008.


Larry wants to call you and discuss two corrections to this piece ("one minor, one major"). I've already passed on your email address for good measure, but you should reach out to him.


I've emailed him to follow up. Thanks for letting me know!


Thanks for writing this. This story is rarely told correctly and you mostly got it as I remember it.


Thanks - I was struggling to believe GitHub would have launched with something as bad looking - 2008 was not CERN era looking webpages!




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