

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

I may be showing my young age here, but before Mercurial/Git there was SVN, and before that SourceSafe and the like.&#60;p&#62;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?&#60;p&#62;I've always been curious.
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ig1
<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>

~~~
beagle3
and before that:

cp -a project project.$TODAY

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infinii
MKS

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stray
In the beginning there was sccs.

~~~
davismwfl
Not to forget RCS as well.

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caw
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.

