▲ 4 points

Ask HN: What did software engineers use before source control existed?

by sergiotapia·13y ago·6 comments·view on hn ↗

I may be showing my young age here, but before Mercurial/Git there was SVN, and before that SourceSafe and the like.<p>What did software devs at IBM in the time of thick rimmed glasses and cheesy porn moustaches use? Did they just keep a backlog of their entire code base copied and timestamped?<p>I've always been curious.

6 comments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System

Before that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_Control_System

Before that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System

and before that:

cp -a project project.$TODAY

MKS

In the beginning there was sccs.

Not to forget RCS as well.

My work still uses RCS (in addition to SVN and git and probably 14 other version control programs). It's great for adding individual files like conf files. Mess something up and want to reset? Just check the file out again and overwrite the existing file.