Around 2003-2006 immediately before git (and mercurial) there were a bunch of new open source distributed VCSes. http://moinmo.in/NewVCS http://moinmo.in/NewVCS

Around 2003-2006 immediately before git (and mercurial) there were a bunch of new open source distributed VCSes. http://moinmo.in/NewVCS http://moinmo.in/NewVCS lists a few of them from the time. Bazaar, Bazaar-NG, Codeville, Darcs, Monotone Git and Mercurial used ideas from a few of them and made them faster and more usable. For git it helped that there was a large project primed to switch to a new VCS. https://dwheeler.com/essays/scm.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/scm.html is another good source from that period (disclosure I helped with Monotone a bit)