Oomph, the weasel world "popular" makes it hard to argue with, but source code version control systems have been around for a long time and have been, at least in commercial code, used. E.g. SCCS was first released in 1973.

Linus was not necessarily wrong in refusing such for the development of Linux until he could be persuaded to use BitKeeper post-burnout, but it was an, er, contrarian stance.