also rebases instead of merges wouldn't count as merges

Correct. I had used both at work up until around 2005. The idiot large companies I worked at did not believe in Source Code Control. That is the one thing I liked about RCS/SCCS, once I checked out an item, no one could check in their changes unless they contacted me. Forcing a coordinated manual merge between us.

I tried to get our org on to something for a while, but got massive push back until 5 or 6 years ago when they setup corporate wide paid githup repo.

Before that, I found a small group of developers around 2005 that used CVS and they allowed me to leverage that for my group. But of course I was the only one who used it.

Back then I guess people loved loosing source code, which happened a lot until git.

Don't know about 30 years ago but 25 years ago in a small shop, the code was on a network share, on the production server.

And whenever a code file was locked on the server, the Devs went into the server room (aka the break room with a computer) and rebooted the server. The production server that was used by 30+ employees.

30 years ago (1995) open source offerings: mostly CVS for large projects and RCS for smaller ones. On the proprietary side, the aged SCCS was available and used, while Perforce and Microsoft Visual Source Safe were being launched.

A stack of labelled backup tapes.

Whereas today, we have a stack of virtual backup tapes plus a DAG on the labels.

IN 1995, I think there were some proprietary offerings, one company in Massachusetts was purchased by IBM back then.

But on the minis (non-DEC) I worked on back then, there was nothing. We kept a specific drive that had source current source, but once in production you just copied the change version to that drive, replacing what was already there. As you can guess, changes disappeared often :) And there was no change history, but we would tag each line changed with our 3 character ID.