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Comment by Sander_Marechal | Hacker News Reader

Yes, MS Visual Sourcesafe (VSS). It was... not very good

Back in the late 90s we used to call it Visual SourceSieve - code changes would just leak away through the holes. Words cannot explain how much of a step up git (or even SVN) was.

As I recall, the main problem was that VSS didn't have a proper server! Instead the client modified files in the repository directly using Window's file sharing, relying on locks to maintain consistency. This would have been a bad idea even in Window's file shares weren't slow and buggy.

I believe Visual Source Unsafe used the same storage layer as early versions of Exchange, which would break catastrophically when the underlying file grew past 2GB. Less than ideal.

they also had an internal source control system that they never released, which was a fork of perforce that they had purchased the rights to use and modify. Not sure if that's still in use in any projects.

It was, however, a step up from the shared network drive with a bunch of zip files.

Debatable. You would come into work in the morning and find that VSS had been corrupted and needed to be restored to an earlier backup. This was a common occurrence.

That the lovely common occurrence of someone checking out 1000 files and going on vacation.

I preferred just a normal folder, rsync (or some nt utils equivalent) and backups.

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