How did people develop software before git or version control?

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.

There were many revision/version control systems prior to git, but practices have matured and standardized since then. It can be as simple as a tarball with a timestamp going to tape backup if you're into 80s style.

Here's a REALLY interesting piece of background about the "ancient" history of version control systems, this goes back even to the time BEFORE computing started, describing the processed that were used in industrial engineering (managing technical drawings and designs):

red-gate.com/blog/database-devops/...

Of course none of those "version control" processes were automated, I guess there were "librarians", just people who archived versions of the drawings in "file" cabinets, just drawers with codes and numbers where they kept the old versions of the drawings.

When computing started with mainframes and punch cards (where a computer with the processing power of your contemporary PC or smartphone would be as big as your living room), "version" control used these same manual processes - as a programmer you would give your "deck" of cards to a librarian who would "archive" a version of it in the "library" (just a storage room with cabinets with drawers containing physical copies of the card decks, organized and numbered so that people could find and retrieve them).

I think that truly automated Source Control started after UNIX "mini computers" were invented, which did not use punch cards and printers anymore but keyboards and "terminals" (monitors). The oldest source control system was SCCS invented in 1972:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_...

None of this was networked or multi-user, it must have been clumsy and difficult to use, here you can read about how laborious it was to use it:

ericsink.com/vcbe/html/author_back...

So, from that time onwards "source control" existed but I'm pretty sure that for less important programs people didn't bother with source control, they just dumped backups of their "spaghetti code" programmed in dBase III Plus or whatever on a 360Kb floppy disk and called it a day :-) .... source control was probably just for the "high end".

Around 1984 Microsoft introduced "SourceSafe" and I think from then on source control really became "mainstream". Then CVS came (better than SourceSafe), SVN came (better than CVS), then GIT came (WAY better than all the others), and the rest is history :-)

rsync -arvz my_super_website user@145.134.234.210:/var/html/my_super_website

Or Filezilla.

... it was a mess. I don't even want to speak about Subversion. Git is a weird tool, pretty difficult to learn, even more difficult to master. But it brings so much flexibility.

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).

While, as many are saying, there were other source code management systems before git, they weren't widespread and, at least where I'm from they were considered a waste of time...
Of course developing in a team was an ugly mess, but the tendency was to split work in folders/be more modular, and make a lot of backups (more than once a day) so you could get to older versions of your code in case of serious problems.
Git especially (since branching is extremely cheap) improved things hugely: first time I used it after a few years on subversion it was like having superpowers 😂

Another approach that was around was that you'd simply have one person actually write the software, with a team around in some kind of "pair programming", and there wasn't actually any source code in files. Instead, the program was a "living thing", an image, and source code a mere serialization of its state. That was mainly done on lisp machines, but other languages that followed that approach were e.g. SmallTalk. Pharo is an example of that.

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!

I used to work on a project that used SVN, but also had header comment blocks with file authorship, creation date, and a list of key changes.

Spent the first 6-8 yrs of my Dev career using SCCS back when I wrote Informix 4GL code.

How did people develop software now without using version control? Yes, it happens (even in teams, not just solo devs).

This reddit post is worth a read.

reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eap...