Way back in the day at Microsoft it was a common practice to add the author's name, email and a small description of changes in the header comment at the top of source files. Then management started making us scrub all of them before release when vendors/competitors started using our source dumps as their recruiting database.
I've seen a fairly old codebase (started in the late 1980s) where the tops of the files have author details and changes but the author details are just initials.
Ah right - not sure what version control this project started (in 1989 I'm guessing "none" is a high probability) and I think it recently got moved from SVN to git.
I am not a programer, but I always regarded this practice as weird. Every time I saw such headers in my company the header would feature a name of some long-gone employee. So no point of knowing the author's name since you cannot reach him for help.
And if I really wanted to know the author's name, then git log --follow would help me anyway
Nothing but a someone's ego boost and a theft of my screen space
