TLA was one of my first too, if not the first foray outside CVS.
I worked on a POC porting it to Windows and had to port GNU tar to support large file names. TLA was truly revolutionary!
Similarly, I managed a Solaris build of arch for a while. arch/larch/arx/tla/baz was pretty cool. But Tom was in denial about its short comings. Particularly speed.
Unfortunately yes. That was interesting system before git…