git didn't invent version control

[steevhise]

You write
GitHub didn’t invent version control. It took a program called git
but even git wasn't the first version control system.
I used CVS for years and then Subversion for years before git came around. And there were others before CVS, I think something called rcs, for one… the concept is actually really really old. the big innovation is that github added a really easy, pretty web UI (at just the right time) and turned distributed collaborative coding into a big social network too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control

Anyway - thanks for such a great article.

[lorkki]

This was the one omission that caught my eye, too. Version control has been around for a long time - but Git democratized it, by meeting the workflow needs of one notably popular and democratic piece of software. It also followed on the heels of BitKeeper, which provided some of the same concepts, but is now remembered mainly for the licensing disputes that led to the development of Git and Mercurial.

Seems a bit unfair to SVN, which was hugely popular not so long ago (...Wait, what? It's really been 12 years?).