May 4, 2026
Commit history, but make it chaos
From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control
How one rushed fix became everyone’s forever tool — and fans are still fighting about it
TLDR: Git, the code-tracking tool Linus Torvalds built in ten days during a licensing fight, still rules software work decades later. But commenters turned the story into a nostalgia brawl, with some defending older tools, others mocking Git’s complexity, and one person rage-posting about the site’s distracting background.
This story starts like a tech legend and ends like a family reunion argument. The article looks back at 30 years of saving code, from the truly cursed era of "FINAL_v2" folders, floppy disks, and weekly tape backups to today’s world where almost everyone uses Git — the code-saving tool Linus Torvalds famously threw together in just ten days after a licensing blowup. The wild part? Twenty-one years later, nobody has seriously replaced it.
But the real fireworks are in the comments, where the old-school crowd showed up ready to defend their favorites like retired athletes in a bar debate. One lone rebel proudly declared that for solo projects, Subversion still wins because Git brings “too much extra friction,” and honestly? That global revision number nostalgia hit hard. Meanwhile, another commenter basically yelled, “Where are my RCS people at?” — a tiny but mighty cry from the vintage-computing faithful.
Then came the spicy disagreement over whether old, clunky tools were actually bad. One person confessed they almost liked CVS because it made branching so annoying that teams just worked together on one main version. Efficiency or Stockholm syndrome? You decide. And in peak internet fashion, a totally separate mini-drama erupted when someone ignored the history lesson and roasted the website itself for an animated background that made the text “literally illegible.” So yes: the article says Git won. The commenters say the real winners are nostalgia, stubborn habits, and the eternal right to complain.
Key Points
- •The article says Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days in April 2005 after BitKeeper revoked its free license for Linux kernel development.
- •It describes common pre-version-control practices such as dated zip archives, manual folder copies for branching, tape backups, and informal locking by email or whiteboard.
- •It cites Visual SourceSafe as a widely used Microsoft-shop option that was known for repository corruption, making offline backups a standard precaution.
- •The article identifies SCCS (1972) and RCS (1982) as early formal source control systems that were file-based and lock-based.
- •It states that concepts such as deltas, check-in/check-out, and revision history from early systems shaped later tools including CVS and ultimately Git.