Devtov Online — Version Control Systems Explained | devtov.online
A dated table of the systems from SCCS in 1972 to the distributed wave of 2005, with the model each one introduced.
The Source Code Control System (SCCS) appeared in 1972 for the OS/360 mainframe. It is the first entry in this table and the origin point of the discipline: a program that stored successive revisions of a file so any earlier state could be retrieved.
Revision Control System (RCS) dates to 1982, and CVS added network and concurrent features from 1986. CVS was rewritten in C in 1990, which is the version most teams of that era ran. PVCS arrived in 1985 between RCS and CVS's network features.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Subversion was released in 2000 as a direct successor to CVS. In 2005, three distributed systems appeared in the same year: Git, Mercurial and GNU Bazaar. Fossil followed in 2007.
The pattern across these entries is a shift in where the history lives. SCCS, RCS and early CVS kept the repository on one machine; the 2005 systems put a full copy of the history on every developer's disk, which changes how commits, checkouts and merges are performed but not what they mean.
Read the table below as a sequence of models rather than a leaderboard: each system solved a problem the previous one left open, from single-file tracking to concurrent edits on a shared repository to fully distributed history.
Further reading