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It’s always a question if the source is still around now or on accessible media. Especially if said products were part of one or more acquisitions. Source con
by oso2k 4y ago
It’s always a question if the source is still around now or on accessible media. Especially if said products were part of one or more acquisitions. Source control usage has only been popular the last 20-25 years. Before Linus wrote git, the Linux kernel was kind of responsible for even making the idea that source control systems should be part of the development process in popular OSS. Zip files, tarballs, directory dumps were popular in the early and mid 90s. Super hard to get sources out if it’s stuck on a special machine that wasn’t network connected, maybe exotic media like WORM drives, kangaroo drives, backpack drives, 5.25” floppies, etc.
- guenthert 4y agoOomph, the weasel world "popular" makes it hard to argue with, but source code version control systems have been around for a long time and have been, at least in commercial code, used. E.g. SCCS was first released in 1973. Linus was not necessarily wrong in refusing such for the development of Linux until he could be persuaded to use BitKeeper post-burnout, but it was an, er, contrarian stance.
- oso2k 4y agoI hear ya. Maybe you could argue that GNU, BSD or a few other groups were using SCCS but that’s relatively very few developers in comparison to the DOS, Windows 3.x, Amiga, BBC, Apple that we’re producing more code at the time. I’ve seen few bits of early NASA/JPL code and it wasn’t in source control, it was on NFS.