We all know and maybe have been using git or any other version control system for our projects. But do you know how it all got started? This blog gives you a brief gist of how it all started, about the idea of maintaining versions of our work.

Source code control system(SCCS) : This was the start of version controlling practice. It was originally developed at Bell Labs beginning in late 1972 by Marc Rochkind for an IBM System. It used to come free with unix.

Revision control system (RCS): RCS was first released in 1982 by Walter F. Tichy at Purdue University, It was open source and cross platform. It came up with a smarter storage system hence it was faster. It would store latest version and sets of changes. RCS stores a set of edit instructions to go back to an earlier version of the file.

But the major drawback of these systems were that you could only use it with one file.

This issue was resolved by Concurrent versions system(CVS): It was developed by Dick Grune in July 1986, It was majorly used during the period 1986-1990. Here you could track multiple files and entire project. Also it was a multi user repository. It expands upon RCS by adding support for repository-level change tracking, and a client-server mode.

Apache subversion (SVN) Subversion is an open source version control system. Founded in 2000 by CollabNet, Inc, Subversion is developed as a project of the Apache Software Foundation. It would track file changes collectively. Subversion system comprises several libraries arranged as layers. Each performs a specific task and allows developers to create their own tools at the desired level of complexity and specificity.

Bit keeper SCM: is a software tool for distributed revision control of computer source code. Originally developed as proprietary software by BitMover Inc. It had distributed version control. The community version was free to use. It was used for the source code of linux kernel from 2002-2005

Git was born in april 2005 created by Linus Torvalds. Git is open source and free software. It is compatible with Linux, Mac os and windows. This is one of the most popular version controlling system and it had a very high number of contributers and developers using git, It kind of revolutionised the open source culture and many active developers started adpating to using git. On 2018 Microsoft acquired github for $7.5 billion