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Discussion on: How did people develop software before git or version control?

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

First off, git is actually relatively young by VCS standards at only 15 years old. By comparison, one of the first widely used VCS tools, SCCS, is currently 48 years old (though it's hard to say if it's still in active usage anywhere as it was only ever designed for local operation). So version control has been around for quite some time.

Before that though, most of the development process involved keeping proper backups, and properly documenting the code so that it can be understood what is going on (and sometimes also documenting what was changed and why).

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siy profile image
Sergiy Yevtushenko

Exactly. At the beginning of my career I've worked on project where we had no VCS. Every single file had at the beginning comment with list of changes where we documented who and what changed (and often why).