[HN Gopher] A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution
___________________________________________________________________
A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution
Author : lioeters
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-11-28 09:32 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spinellis.gr)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spinellis.gr)
| werdl wrote:
| Interesting to see the decisions they took regarding which
| flavours they chose to include.
| phplovesong wrote:
| 670,000 commits. Thats big. But only 2K merges? I assume push
| straight to master in most cases?
| mprovost wrote:
| I don't think either SCCS or RCS tracked merges, so everything
| looks like a new revision.
| lionkor wrote:
| also rebases instead of merges wouldn't count as merges
| DSpinellis wrote:
| I don't think the concept of a rebase existed before
| Bitbucker and Git.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Correct. I had used both at work up until around 2005. The
| idiot large companies I worked at did not believe in Source
| Code Control. That is the one thing I liked about RCS/SCCS,
| once I checked out an item, no one could check in their
| changes unless they contacted me. Forcing a coordinated
| manual merge between us.
|
| I tried to get our org on to something for a while, but got
| massive push back until 5 or 6 years ago when they setup
| corporate wide paid githup repo.
|
| Before that, I found a small group of developers around 2005
| that used CVS and they allowed me to leverage that for my
| group. But of course I was the only one who used it.
|
| Back then I guess people loved loosing source code, which
| happened a lot until git.
| DSpinellis wrote:
| I convinced a software company to use a version control
| system (RCS on shared disk) back in 1993. To make it work
| we had to setup a network -- Ethernet over (thin) coaxial
| cable at the time. This was so new to us that we didn't
| know we needed to use terminators on the two cable ends.
| keybored wrote:
| What did source control look like 30 years ago? Was merges used
| a lot? I have only used Subversion and Git.
| DSpinellis wrote:
| 30 years ago (1995) open source offerings: mostly CVS for
| large projects and RCS for smaller ones. On the proprietary
| side, the aged SCCS was available and used, while Perforce
| and Microsoft Visual Source Safe were being launched.
| leoc wrote:
| (Meanwhile, apparently MS itself continued using SLM, the
| in-house source-control system which had been
| commercialised as MS Delta, internally until about 2000.
| https://wiki.c2.com/?MicrosoftDelta https://devblogs.micros
| oft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
| https://ricomariani.medium.com/super-brief-notes-on-early-
| so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255526 )
| jmclnx wrote:
| IN 1995, I think there were some proprietary offerings, one
| company in Massachusetts was purchased by IBM back then.
|
| But on the minis (non-DEC) I worked on back then, there was
| nothing. We kept a specific drive that had source current
| source, but once in production you just copied the change
| version to that drive, replacing what was already there. As
| you can guess, changes disappeared often :) And there was no
| change history, but we would tag each line changed with our 3
| character ID.
| kps wrote:
| A stack of labelled backup tapes.
|
| Whereas today, we have a stack of virtual backup tapes plus a
| DAG on the labels.
|
| (OK, _only_ 30 years ago we were using SCCS or maybe already
| RCS.)
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Don't know about 30 years ago but 25 years ago in a small
| shop, the code was on a network share, on the production
| server.
|
| And whenever a code file was locked on the server, the Devs
| went into the server room (aka the break room with a
| computer) and rebooted the server. The production server that
| was used by 30+ employees.
| leoc wrote:
| Right: I don't have direct experience, but from what I
| recall reading it was only over the Subversion era that it
| really became strikingly abnormal for a professional
| software team to use no VC software at all. When there was
| software it could be ... exotic. The FOSS culture's pre-SVN
| norm of "CVS everywhere" put it notably ahead of others.
| jlokier wrote:
| If the original develoeprs had used Git, they'd be mostly fast-
| forward merges. Those are the default merge operation in Git,
| and they don't appear as merge commits in a repo.
|
| However, there commits start 33 years before Git was created.
| Merge commits were not even a concept back than.
| DSpinellis wrote:
| I published an updated extension of this post's linked article in
| Empirical Software Engineering. You can read it without a paywall
| at https://rdcu.be/b7FzE. You may also be interested to see the
| actual GitHub repository at https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-
| history-repo.
| zvr wrote:
| Right. The title of this submission should have a "(2015)".
| aap_ wrote:
| Hopefully UNIX v4 will soon be in there too :)
| DSpinellis wrote:
| Indeed! The repo includes some v4 elements:
| https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/Researc...
|
| The provided kernel predates the actual edition by a few
| months. It is based on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributio
| ns/Research/Dennis_v..., which matches V4 more than V3.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-28 23:01 UTC)