version control has been around in one for or another since the 1960s. Before that well they made backups and put a lot of comments in the code to keep code just in case. I think!
"The IEBUPDTE program, originally created for IBM's OS/360 system, dates back to 1962, 10 years older than SCCS. Its purpose is to apply a set of changes to a set of input source programs, creating a set of modified source programs. All source code was managed either as "decks" of 80-column punched cards, or as files that resembled them."
Ah right, cool ... so it worked with punch cards and so on but conceptually you can very well make the argument that this was the granddad of all source control systems :-) even though I see people arguing about whether or not IEBUPDTE truly "was" a version control system - the concept "version control system" probably did not exist yet, so IEBUPDTE did not advertise itself as such ... but conceptually it was a precursor.
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
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).
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).
I think any time anybody did anything before the current thing existed is, by and large, the same way they do it now: By stretching the boundaries of what is possible and having a lot of frustrating experiences as a result.
As we make progress in the software industry, things don't necessarily get "easier", we just start attempting more challenging things.
One place I worked earlier in my career which did not use source control had a development server on the office network instead.
We mapped its drive and simply loaded the code files on it directly in our editors, made changes, and saved them.
I remember that one or two files in the codebase of a site on there were quite popular and we always had to ask others in the office if they were working on these files to avoid overwriting each others work (and yes this happened from time to time).
It was a pretty awful way of working. Fine if only one person was working on the codebase at a time, but as soon as others tried working on it at the same time we had lots of issues.
I was glad once we changed to using source control.
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version control has been around in one for or another since the 1960s. Before that well they made backups and put a lot of comments in the code to keep code just in case. I think!
The oldest version control system (I think) was SCCS invented around 1972:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_...
Do you know of automated version control systems older than that?
There is a lot of back and forth but some argument over IEBUPDTE?
softwareengineering.stackexchange....
"The IEBUPDTE program, originally created for IBM's OS/360 system, dates back to 1962, 10 years older than SCCS. Its purpose is to apply a set of changes to a set of input source programs, creating a set of modified source programs. All source code was managed either as "decks" of 80-column punched cards, or as files that resembled them."
Ah right, cool ... so it worked with punch cards and so on but conceptually you can very well make the argument that this was the granddad of all source control systems :-) even though I see people arguing about whether or not IEBUPDTE truly "was" a version control system - the concept "version control system" probably did not exist yet, so IEBUPDTE did not advertise itself as such ... but conceptually it was a precursor.
They made copies on diskettes, of course.
First off,
gitis 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).
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).
I think any time anybody did anything before the current thing existed is, by and large, the same way they do it now: By stretching the boundaries of what is possible and having a lot of frustrating experiences as a result.
As we make progress in the software industry, things don't necessarily get "easier", we just start attempting more challenging things.
One place I worked earlier in my career which did not use source control had a development server on the office network instead.
We mapped its drive and simply loaded the code files on it directly in our editors, made changes, and saved them.
I remember that one or two files in the codebase of a site on there were quite popular and we always had to ask others in the office if they were working on these files to avoid overwriting each others work (and yes this happened from time to time).
It was a pretty awful way of working. Fine if only one person was working on the codebase at a time, but as soon as others tried working on it at the same time we had lots of issues.
I was glad once we changed to using source control.
Like Google Drive?
Spent the first 6-8 yrs of my Dev career using SCCS back when I wrote Informix 4GL code.
Flashdisk
How did people develop software now without using version control? Yes, it happens (even in teams, not just solo devs).