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Comment by keybored | Hacker News Reader

What did source control look like 30 years ago? Was merges used a lot? I have only used Subversion and Git.

30 years ago (1995) open source offerings: mostly CVS for large projects and RCS for smaller ones. On the proprietary side, the aged SCCS was available and used, while Perforce and Microsoft Visual Source Safe were being launched.

(Meanwhile, apparently MS itself continued using SLM, the in-house source-control system which had been commercialised as MS Delta, internally until about 2000. https://wiki.c2.com/?MicrosoftDelta https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97... https://ricomariani.medium.com/super-brief-notes-on-early-so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255526 )

A stack of labelled backup tapes.

Whereas today, we have a stack of virtual backup tapes plus a DAG on the labels.

(OK, only 30 years ago we were using SCCS or maybe already RCS.)

Don't know about 30 years ago but 25 years ago in a small shop, the code was on a network share, on the production server.

And whenever a code file was locked on the server, the Devs went into the server room (aka the break room with a computer) and rebooted the server. The production server that was used by 30+ employees.

Right: I don't have direct experience, but from what I recall reading it was only over the Subversion era that it really became strikingly abnormal for a professional software team to use no VC software at all. When there was software it could be ... exotic. The FOSS culture's pre-SVN norm of "CVS everywhere" put it notably ahead of others.

IN 1995, I think there were some proprietary offerings, one company in Massachusetts was purchased by IBM back then.

But on the minis (non-DEC) I worked on back then, there was nothing. We kept a specific drive that had source current source, but once in production you just copied the change version to that drive, replacing what was already there. As you can guess, changes disappeared often :) And there was no change history, but we would tag each line changed with our 3 character ID.

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