I was working at a game development company in the mid 90s that used Visual Source Safe and to avoid file corruption due to concurrent commits, we had a shiny silver baseball cap which you had to find and physically possess to commit.

After we had off-site devs, the physical cap wouldn't work. So the project had a "silvercap.txt" file and you had to exclusively check out . And of course people forgot to release that and work ground to a halt.

You can remove the "over a WAN" part: VSS had been designed as a local VCS, so until the addition of a proper server in the mid aught using it over a network share was the only way to actually use it. And it really wasn't good.

I don't know if that made it better, I assume not much, VSS was really trash.