Fifty Years of Software Development

I’ve been in software development since the mid-eighties. We used PVCS integrated with BRIEF for C development. I did work for large corporations in those days, so I can’t speak for what smaller shops were doing.

Since then every company I’ve worked for has used a version control tool of some sort - VSS, Clearcase, CMVC, TFS, and so forth.

I’ve got to agree with the sccs going back further than the mid-90s - I was working on a legacy system for a big company that had deltas going back to 1978. Of course, I didn’t get around to putting my home directory under source control (subversion) until a couple of years ago.

“Perhaps instead of ‘mainstream’ you meant small teams?”

Small teams have been the vast majority of professional programmers for a long time. For every company with a hundred developers there are a thousand companies with 10 or less developers.

So in this context, I think that “mainstream” and “small teams” means the same thing. If only large teams were using source control, then it was niche.