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Some of these stories sound a bit far fetched, especially those that involve Unix systems. RCS was released in 1982 and CVS in 1990 so Unix systems have had ve

Some of these stories sound a bit far fetched, especially those that involve Unix systems. RCS was released in 1982 and CVS in 1990 so Unix systems have had version control available for over forty years.

bdbdhxhdh 2y ago
There is a lag between availability and mindshare to apply a technology. I myself introduced SVN as versioning solution to a company in 2007, years after git was available I and I was aware of it git simply didn't have the mind share jet, thus I went with what I knew
- Iwan-Zotow 2y ago
  Hear, hear Git was too weird for a team, but svn with its linear timeline was a hit. They are still with svn, and for a small shop it's ok
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > I myself introduced SVN as versioning solution to a company in 2007 In 2013, I was tasked with writing wrapper scripts around SVN to make it look like SCCS to avoid confusing the development people who only knew how to use SCCS whilst the company migrated to SVN. Fun but traumatising.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
I can assure you they are true. Version control was still “controversial” in a lot of shops for quite some time. Plenty of places had the classic “v1, v2.3, v2_next_debug_cruffle_duffle” way of managing versions for a very, very long time. Well into the subversion era…
- CRConrad 2y ago
  I know places that still do it that way. Not necessarily tiny places either.
teractiveodular 2y ago
In the late 2000s, I worked at $MAJOR_TELCO where management steadfastly refused to implement version control. Upgrades in production were executed by individually SSHing into each physical machine in the prod cluster and typing in commands by hand. My attempt to introduce a "multissh" tool that automatically executed the same commands in each node at once was regarded with the highest suspicion and shot down. Shortly after I left, they had a multi-week outage caused by somebody fat-fingering the permissions on a network interface.
nvy 2y ago
At least as late as 1998, I recall version control was thought of in some circles the way people think of C vs memory-safe languages today. Some thought version control was an obvious improvement to make better, more bug-free software. Others had a fetish for doing things the hard way with little justification beyond emotional resistance.
eichin 2y ago
SCCS was released in 1977 and it hasn't even turned up in these comments at all. "Not evenly distributed". (I introduced RCS as a replacement for "just editing files" at a job in 1990; "there's a man page and some binaries on the system" really doesn't contribute to adoption. CVS at least propagated through things like USENIX, because solbourne made cool toys and talked about the challenges.)
inkyoto 2y ago
Version control was virtually unknown outside UNIX systems, though, and, in lieu of it, mainframe/PC/Mac developers resorted to barbaric practices which included file tree renaming (v2, v1_John_is_an_idiot), countless zip files with similarly meaningful names with snapshots of entire projects and stuff like that. Then commercial version control systems started popping up, and they were very expensive, usually buggy af, and had no feature parity across themselves, i.e. knowledge of each was not portable. Whereas nearly every UNIX installation included version control systems for free (SCCS in AT&T UNIX SVR1-4, RCS in BSD UNIX or both) that worked exactly the same everywhere.

bdbdhxhdh 2y ago

There is a lag between availability and mindshare to apply a technology. I myself introduced SVN as versioning solution to a company in 2007, years after git was available I and I was aware of it git simply didn't have the mind share jet, thus I went with what I knew

Iwan-Zotow 2y ago
Hear, hear Git was too weird for a team, but svn with its linear timeline was a hit. They are still with svn, and for a small shop it's ok
zimpenfish 2y ago
> I myself introduced SVN as versioning solution to a company in 2007 In 2013, I was tasked with writing wrapper scripts around SVN to make it look like SCCS to avoid confusing the development people who only knew how to use SCCS whilst the company migrated to SVN. Fun but traumatising.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago

I can assure you they are true. Version control was still “controversial” in a lot of shops for quite some time. Plenty of places had the classic “v1, v2.3, v2_next_debug_cruffle_duffle” way of managing versions for a very, very long time. Well into the subversion era…

CRConrad 2y ago
I know places that still do it that way. Not necessarily tiny places either.

teractiveodular 2y ago

In the late 2000s, I worked at $MAJOR_TELCO where management steadfastly refused to implement version control. Upgrades in production were executed by individually SSHing into each physical machine in the prod cluster and typing in commands by hand. My attempt to introduce a "multissh" tool that automatically executed the same commands in each node at once was regarded with the highest suspicion and shot down. Shortly after I left, they had a multi-week outage caused by somebody fat-fingering the permissions on a network interface.

nvy 2y ago

At least as late as 1998, I recall version control was thought of in some circles the way people think of C vs memory-safe languages today. Some thought version control was an obvious improvement to make better, more bug-free software. Others had a fetish for doing things the hard way with little justification beyond emotional resistance.

eichin 2y ago

SCCS was released in 1977 and it hasn't even turned up in these comments at all. "Not evenly distributed". (I introduced RCS as a replacement for "just editing files" at a job in 1990; "there's a man page and some binaries on the system" really doesn't contribute to adoption. CVS at least propagated through things like USENIX, because solbourne made cool toys and talked about the challenges.)

inkyoto 2y ago

Version control was virtually unknown outside UNIX systems, though, and, in lieu of it, mainframe/PC/Mac developers resorted to barbaric practices which included file tree renaming (v2, v1_John_is_an_idiot), countless zip files with similarly meaningful names with snapshots of entire projects and stuff like that. Then commercial version control systems started popping up, and they were very expensive, usually buggy af, and had no feature parity across themselves, i.e. knowledge of each was not portable. Whereas nearly every UNIX installation included version control systems for free (SCCS in AT&T UNIX SVR1-4, RCS in BSD UNIX or both) that worked exactly the same everywhere.