I picked up the CVS habit almost exactly 20 years ago (1996) from someone in the banking & finance industry -- hardly a bastion of radical adoption. By then, C

I picked up the CVS habit almost exactly 20 years ago (1996) from someone in the banking & finance industry -- hardly a bastion of radical adoption. By then, CVS was 10 years old. We used RCS extensively to manage config files. To the earlier parent who mentioned process isolation: You're thinking too much about the consumer/desktop world. The entire enterprise world was used to it and demanded it, be it on (hey, humor here) SCO UNIX (yes, they really did make a useful product before they turned evil), SunOS, VAX/VMS, MVS, BSD UNIX, etc. The desktop world was far behind the state of the art in commercial systems in those days. Even in the 80s, you were quite possibly running your enterprise with an Oracle database, on fully memory-protected hardware. Heck - you may have even been running some of your stuff in a VM on an IBM mainframe. We took some big jumps backwards in pursuit of making computers cost-effective enough for mass adoption, and it took a while before the consumer side of things jumped forward to become the same platforms used for enterprise use. Kids these days. ;)