Before the web there was usenet. People would assemble and curate lists of links and post them to newsgroups dedicated to particular languages or fields of inte

Before the web there was usenet. People would assemble and curate lists of links and post them to newsgroups dedicated to particular languages or fields of interest. People would assemble CDs stuffed with code, you'd send them a few bucks and they'd send you a copy by mail. In the 1980s you'd buy computer magazines and check the classifieds. For a few bucks you'd get a floppy disk mailed to you. Netscape did a lot to move project management to the web. Bugzilla was written in the mid-1990s. Before that all bug reporting and issue tracking was done via email. If you were good you'd email a patch to the author to fix a bug or add a feature, just as people still do with Linus. He wrote git initially as an improved tool to merge patches received by email.