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

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p4tin profile image
Paul Fortin

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!

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leob profile image
leob

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?

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p4tin profile image
Paul Fortin

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."

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leob profile image
leob

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.