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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that before git a substantial portion of the industry used the "one big shared drive and shouting across the room to lock files" version control system. There was also SVN that was pretty popular pre-git.

I don't believe any version control system achieved as deep industry penetration as git has.

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In my experience, SVN was _everywhere_ 10 years ago or so.

I used SVN once for my capstone project 11 years ago, graduated that same year, and literally haven't encountered it a single time in my career since then.

It definitely wasn't everywhere 10 years ago (but github was). Do you mean 15-20?

Regardless, having completed a CS degree during the period SVN was supposedly everywhere and only encountered it once because someone in my capstone team knew how to use it, I'm inclined to think it didn't permeate everything the way git does now.

If I could complete a bachelors in CS without encountering it in any of my courses, I think it's safe to say git is much more ingrained in the field now (pretty much every syllabus I come across online for CS courses from the last 5 years has had some github links)

SVNs heyday is closer to 15 years ago at this point.

I've been in the industry for 25 years and have never seen it done that way anywhere. First place I worked used PVCS then migrated to Clear Case. The first free one I used was CVS.

I'd say each predecessor had about the same level of penetration, which was 'nearly all'. CVS->SVN-GIT. Git will be replaced. It's ripe for that - its interface is terrible, storage is now cheap, and many companies have no actual need for decentralized version control and the complexity that comes with it.

Easiest to use of the bunch is still svn. You can teach a developer everything they need to know in 5 minutes and there's 3-5 commands total you'll need to use ever. I never once saw anyone get into some nightmare state they needed help to dig out of like I've seen routinely with git.

subversion was just as dominant as git is now. Not using version control at all is probably just as common as it was previously.

SVN took over the hobbyist area rapidly due to its workflow/UI similarity to CVS, but P4 held fast professionally until at least 2015, as well as Source Safe if you were an MS shop. (And conservative places never switched off CVS at all.)

That matches my experience too. SVN and CVS was very common as far as I remember. More developers probably use version control now than before, but version control was considered part of "best practice" before git was released.

There were of course places that were late to switch. I remember one of my old work places used P4 due to legacy in the CI/CD pipelines, but many teams kept a "shadow" git repository in Bitbucket with a bridge to P4. After a while, the company finally switched to Github Enterprise

>one big shared drive and shouting across the room to lock files

yes ... how did you know we used visual source safe?

By the mid-90's VSS supported exclusively locking files and requiring files to be locked before working on them.

Well, kinda? We did that. Then we discovered that about 10% of the time it didn't actually lock anything. So we included yelling across the room into our "grab it exclusively from VSS".

Yes, we had MS support, and they looked into it, and eventually basically shrugged (I'm told. I wasn't the one working with them).

> a substantial portion of the industry used the "one big shared drive and shouting across the room to lock files"

Perhaps, but I've never seen that done. The version control system that is in fashion changes over time, but for my entire multidecade career there has always been one.

If you take a look at Rapid Development (published 1996), one of the classic mistakes it lists is not using version control. A number of other 90s and earlier texts lament people not using version control.

Personally, a guy I dealt with circa 2010 stood up in a meeting on building better site-wide development processes, and asked what the point of version control was.

So, you've been lucky.

Sure, I remember when that complaint was often cited. I'm just saying that using a version control system was the most common case even then. It wasn't as common as it should have been, though, that's true. But using version control was still common well before git came around.

Now, if you go back to the mid '80s and earlier, version control was rare.

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