I don't know what the date would be, but I think somewhere before "you can keep lots of versions in one file" should go "you can keep lots of versions of one file" -- a versioning file system. Not sure when this was introduced; Wikipedia thinks it may have been in ITS.
I used to work on a large Lisp system where our entire source control system was provided by Emacs versions and locking on a central NFS server, with some explicit branching support in the build code, and with version freezing done by copying directories. I can hear you gagging, dear reader, but actually it didn't work that badly, except that it didn't handle distributed development.
I used to work on a large Lisp system where our entire source control system was provided by Emacs versions and locking on a central NFS server, with some explicit branching support in the build code, and with version freezing done by copying directories. I can hear you gagging, dear reader, but actually it didn't work that badly, except that it didn't handle distributed development.