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I remember being so confused by SF in its first years. Why would I want this, instead of CVS in AFS or over SSH?

The idea that most software developers wouldn't have routable workstations, wouldn't have servers they controlled---that we wouldn't keep running networked file systems over the Internet---totally not obvious. The SF people foresaw a need in a changing world and got in front of it.

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When and where were you that use of AFS was normal?

Not the commenter, but guessing AFS = andrew file system.

This has been used for decades by a lot of the universities who were original internet consumers (MIT, Univ of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, etc). In fact, it is still used by a lot of these universities and research institutions for data sharing and distributed computing, afaik.

Our department is still using it, but it is crumbling. E.g. the macOS clients are outdated. Even when there were still updates, they would come months after a new OS X release.

(It must be a lot of work for the AFS maintainers to keep everything up to date.)

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