A practitioner’s history of source control from 1990 to present, tracing why every major system failed and how Git became the permanent default.
Key Takeaways
Visual SourceSafe database corruption was so routine that “restore from backup” was documented IT procedure, not a disaster scenario.
CVS had no atomic commits; a five-file commit could half-succeed if the network died, leaving the repository in an inconsistent state requiring manual reconciliation.
Subversion fixed atomic commits, real branching, and directory versioning but kept the centralized model, making offline work read-only.
Git was written by Linus Torvalds starting April 3, 2005, after BitKeeper revoked its free licence when Andrew Tridgell began reverse-engineering the protocol.
Twenty-one years after Git’s creation, no successor has emerged; the article argues the reason is structural, not cultural.
