Version control software was a lot more primitive and less fun to use in the 90s. On Unix you had CVS, on Windows just VSS. SVN, Mercurial and Git all came post 2000.
And it took SVN a couple extra years to be performant on Windows, which at the time was still the dominant development environment in many places.
Maybe my second SVN project, we had a monorepo, Windows, and a virus scanner (multiply pull time by five). I'd come in in the morning, log in, do an svn up, go get coffee and say hi to the people I was collaborating with, and be back to my desk all before it finished.
Many days I only synced to head twice because it was a pain in the ass, and the SVN maintainers were not at all sympathetic. A new contributor consolidated the config files and cut the number of file open operations by a couple orders of magnitude. I don't think we ever properly thanked that guy.
> A new contributor consolidated the config files and cut the number of file open operations by a couple orders of magnitude. I don't think we ever properly thanked that guy.
Unspoken benefit of “new person” — eventually someone not desensitized to the crap will throw up their hands and fix it.
Sometimes it's so tiny too, but requires you to look at code that nobody else has a reason to look at any more.
I once increased performance of a CMS by 30 percent my first day in the job because I happened to spot a handful of lines of unnecessary string copying while trying to figure out how the thing worked.
Everyone else could have, but none of them had any reason to look at that part of the code because it worked.
I remember using SVN in the early days and it was a huge pain. Some days it even seemed like it caused more problems than it solved. I don't think the situation really improved until Git came along and gave it a kick up the arse.
That said, modern SVN is nice to work with in my limited experience but I'm definitely firmly in the Git camp now.
Early 90s revision control flashbacks on the Windows front ... I recall living through migrations from MKS RCS (by Mortice Kern Systems) to SourceSafe (when it was a One Tree Software product before MSFT bought it) and eventually VSS.
Commandline automation of these for build or deployment scripts was painful but we were grateful for any source control on Windows at all because the alternative was still common and it sounded like this, shouted over a cubicle wall: "Hey, I'm going to edit UTIL.C on the WFW3.11 share ... everyone okay with that?" Cringe.
VMS had pretty nice version control, if you happened to be working on a VAX. It's hard to believe, but in the early 90s you still saw non unix (clone) OSes in the wild.
