In my senior design project in college, we were the only team that decided to use version control. I pushed for it, and set up a CVS server, mostly because I was the team lead and thought it was an easy way to feel like I was making a difference on the team. This was around 2005 or so, git didn’t really exist yet, svn was the new kid on the block and cvs was the established player.

I had never used any vcs before and neither had anyone on any team, but man was it worth it. The ability to have one place with the latest code and not emailing zip files around was great, but so was being able to easily roll back to a known good version if we caused an issue, compare changes, etc. By the end of it we all agreed it would have been impossible to do as well as we did if we didn’t do version control.

(This was a cross disciplinary engineering curriculum with ME/CE/CS, ours was slightly more software-heavy than other teams but everyone had some amount of software. Version control wasn’t taught and most teams just didn’t even consider it. It was a very different time from today.)

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compootr 7 months ago | parent [-]

That seems pretty crazy to me (18M)

even for one-off scripts, I'll often throw them into a VCS because why not!

	▲	ninkendo 7 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It was quite a bit harder back then to set up CVS. You had to have a cvs server running, there was no way to just “git init” and commit as you go and worry about pushing later. (At least not that I knew about then, I was pretty green.) Public hosting services were hard to come by, so it meant setting up a real server on the internet for your colleagues to use, figuring out auth, etc. Nowadays version control is just so easy it’s easy to forget how good we have it. Not just in getting started locally but pushing to a public service that everyone can share (even private repos are free on GitHub nowadays, it’s a complete no brainer.)
	▲	wduquette 7 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		When I started programming professionally in the 1980's there were really only two choices, RCS and SCCS, neither of which were networked, and which were really only readily available on Unix. I suppose there were commercial products for DOS (this was pre-Windows), but again, not readily available. If you wanted better, you had to roll your own. Later, for SunOS, we had big, expensive systems like ClearCASE and Harvest that were (as I recall) weird as all get out, over-engineered, expensive (did I mention expensive?) and all too often designed for the convenience of the management, not the programmers. Then there was CVS, which was a revelation. You didn't have to have a server, if you wanted to use it locally, all by yourself; I did that on my personal laptop. Otherwise you needed to set up a server. Subversion was an improvement. And then came Git (and Fossil, et al) and the world changed forever.