3 ms·

Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today

by culi 2y ago

hleszek 2y ago
2008
nine_k 2y ago
Visual Basic was a smash hit released in 1991. For reference, Perforce was released in 1995, Subversion in 2000, git in 2005. RCS existed, but only in the Unix world.
- icedchai 2y ago
  Don't forget CVS, released in 1990. It was popular for about a decade before Subversion took over.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Did it run under DOS? I'm not even asking about a win16 native GUI client. (You can still enjoy CVS if you want to contribute to OpenBSD, for instance.)
    - icedchai 2y ago
      I'm not sure. In the mid-90's, I worked at a Solaris and NT shop, which was where I first used it.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Yes, and for Win95 users there was actually a very nice GUI plugin to explorer called TortoiseCVS. The funny thing about CVS and Subversion is that they were last version control systems that non-programmers could actually use. TortoiseCVS/TortoiseSVN were easy enough that with a lot of training you could get technical writers or artists to use it too. Valuable for game projects. With git, forget about it. It can't even handle binary files well.
      - bsder 2y ago
        Mercurial and TortoiseHg were fine, too. Only Git had the brain damage to take the source control idea of "there are two areas: working or committed" and add the dumbass index/staging/stash areas that confuse the hell out of everything.
- dafelst 2y ago
  Don't forget Visual Sourcesafe, that came out around 1995 as well and was the standard source control package for most of the Windows shops in the 90s and even up to the mid 2000s (at least in my experience)
  - themadturk 2y ago
    Until about 2014 or so in my department, when we started using SVN. We were more concerned about file locking and a "single version of the truth" of MS Word files stored centrally but accessed locally than we were of fine-grained version control, and Git didn't have the kind of file locking we needed (as I understood it).
- ptx 2y ago
  The documentation for Office 2000 [1] describes version control for Visual Basic using Visual SourceSafe integration, although I'm not sure if anyone used it. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/developer/office2000/aa164416(v=office.10) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/d...
bartread 2y ago
The thing is, I encountered something very similar with a product that had maybe 20 customers… in 2017. All of them had slightly different versions of the codebase. Version control was used, but haphazardly. You’d think this sort of thing would be a problem of the 90s or early 2000s, but I’d bet you there are any number of companies with similar situations today.

Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today

by culi 2y ago

Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today

hleszek 2y ago

2008

nine_k 2y ago

Visual Basic was a smash hit released in 1991. For reference, Perforce was released in 1995, Subversion in 2000, git in 2005. RCS existed, but only in the Unix world.

icedchai 2y ago
Don't forget CVS, released in 1990. It was popular for about a decade before Subversion took over.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Did it run under DOS? I'm not even asking about a win16 native GUI client. (You can still enjoy CVS if you want to contribute to OpenBSD, for instance.)
  - icedchai 2y ago
    I'm not sure. In the mid-90's, I worked at a Solaris and NT shop, which was where I first used it.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Yes, and for Win95 users there was actually a very nice GUI plugin to explorer called TortoiseCVS. The funny thing about CVS and Subversion is that they were last version control systems that non-programmers could actually use. TortoiseCVS/TortoiseSVN were easy enough that with a lot of training you could get technical writers or artists to use it too. Valuable for game projects. With git, forget about it. It can't even handle binary files well.
    - bsder 2y ago
      Mercurial and TortoiseHg were fine, too. Only Git had the brain damage to take the source control idea of "there are two areas: working or committed" and add the dumbass index/staging/stash areas that confuse the hell out of everything.
dafelst 2y ago
Don't forget Visual Sourcesafe, that came out around 1995 as well and was the standard source control package for most of the Windows shops in the 90s and even up to the mid 2000s (at least in my experience)
- themadturk 2y ago
  Until about 2014 or so in my department, when we started using SVN. We were more concerned about file locking and a "single version of the truth" of MS Word files stored centrally but accessed locally than we were of fine-grained version control, and Git didn't have the kind of file locking we needed (as I understood it).
ptx 2y ago
The documentation for Office 2000 [1] describes version control for Visual Basic using Visual SourceSafe integration, although I'm not sure if anyone used it. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/developer/office2000/aa164416(v=office.10) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/d...

bartread 2y ago

The thing is, I encountered something very similar with a product that had maybe 20 customers… in 2017. All of them had slightly different versions of the codebase. Version control was used, but haphazardly. You’d think this sort of thing would be a problem of the 90s or early 2000s, but I’d bet you there are any number of companies with similar situations today.