Version was code written onto a CD-R
Control was a person who got a full 60K Salary for monitoring a room with a bunch of file folders with different versions of the software. When you made a commit you burned a new CD and brought to Tim on the 5th Floor.
You can't make this stuff up.
They used VSS for version control and in team of around 30 people only two folks had check in access. So how do I check in my changes? When you are ready to check in your files, you fill in a 'blue sheet' (a blue paper with form printed on it) by hand. You are supposed to write name, location on your computer for that file, VSS location of the file and comment for each file which you want to check in (by hand on blue sheet). I used to take one day to implement a change request but would take as much as two weeks just to check in the damn files as those gate keepers were always busy. And god forbid if someone else checked in the file which you intended to check in. The gatekeeper will send you back to reconcile the changes and you will be again at the end of the queue. Trust me, I used to get 'blue sheet' nightmares!
When I asked them why they have this weird policy, I was told that it was to prevent people from checking in the code with breaking changes and enforce code review. Mind you, while I was there, gatekeeper didn't review my code even once. Reminds me of the monkeys and banana story.
"Hey Tony, are you working on blahblah.asp? Oh, no?, Great, let me just pull a copy, don't work on it until I say I'm done OK?"
I was fortunate enough at the time (circa 2002) shortly after my arrival to put svn into place. I gotta say though, once you now how to do something the completely wrong way, it's much easier to do it correctly. Ugh.
Before making each change, my team's 'architect' (almost hard to say without laughing/crying) copies her entire checkout folder to a backup folder she has created... painstakingly numbering each backup by date and time. Her explanation: this way she'll be able to revert anything that goes wrong.
So yeah, not real sure why we bother with ClearCase when we have team members implementing ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of Git.
Although the backups were pretty important because the founder was paranoid and insisted that we put the hard drives and swap space of every machine through 25 runs of shred at the end of each day.
The code was written in C++ but the CTO was a Fortran programmer! So no inheritance, no function overloads, no private data. And no malloc/new - there were several global buffers of different sizes statically allocated at startup and you used these, managing your own pointer offsets