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Perforce was like that when I used it. (> 2009)

Why people liked it or even tolerated it still puzzles me.

Edit: While I'm sure this was what I experienced it might be because of configuration by the organization I worked for, but I doubt it as I remember reading everything I could find about Perforce since I disliked it so much and wanted to find out why everyone seemed to like it.

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Perforce has supported concurrent versioning since at least 2001 if not earlier. Individual files could be marked as requiring locks which is useful for binary files for which concurrent changes cannot be merged (one of the big reasons why Perforce is so popular in game development), but it's not either the default or only option. It sounds like your organization had severely misconfigured Perforce.

When you're working with binary, unmergeable files it's a mandatory requirement.

FWIW you could configure P4 to only lock certain file extensions. I also found it useful to find out who was "working" on a file if I had to touch it.

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