Yeah, this was huge at the time. Laptops were good but Wifi wasn't as ubiquitous. If you wanted to work on some code while you were traveling or at a cafe or so

Yeah, this was huge at the time. Laptops were good but Wifi wasn't as ubiquitous. If you wanted to work on some code while you were traveling or at a cafe or something, you'd at best be working without version control, making ".backup" files and directories and stuff. With DVCSes you could branch, commit, etc. as much as you wanted, then sync up when you got back somewhere with good internet.