Development quotes of the fortnight [LWN.net]

The FSF's focus on TPMs here is not only technically wrong, it's indicative of a failure to understand what's actually happening in the industry. While the FSF has been focusing on TPMs, GPU vendors have quietly deployed all of this technology without the FSF complaining at all. Microsoft has enthusiastically participated in making hardware DRM on Windows possible, and user freedoms have suffered as a result, but Playready hardware-based DRM works just fine on hardware that doesn't have a TPM and will continue to do so.

— Matthew Garrett

Around fifty years ago, SCCS introduced version control, demonstrated that it was both helpful and practical, and then within a dozen years or so was replaced by something better (CVS), which in turn was replaced, and so on right up until the present. Whatever is in use today will eventually be replaced, too.
SCCS is both dead and alive. The software is mostly gone away, except for its presence in UNIX releases, IEEE standards, and obsolete software systems.
The ideas introduced by SCCS—controlling versions and recording the changes, who made them, when, and why—made a permanent change to the way software is developed. I’m happy to have contributed to that.

— SCSS creator Marc Rochkind looks back 50 years later

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Now I understand

Posted Jan 9, 2025 6:19 UTC (Thu) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855) [Link] (2 responses)

"SCCS is both dead and alive"

Ah, I see. SCCS is an acronym for Schroedinger's Cat Computer Simulation.

Now I understand

Posted Jan 9, 2025 15:30 UTC (Thu) by tome (subscriber, #3171) [Link] (1 responses)

> SCCS is an acronym for Schroedinger's Cat Computer Simulation.

Uh oh. The cat got out of the box and spawned CVS, which in turn begat Subversion. A zombie dynasty.

Now I understand

Posted Jan 9, 2025 15:47 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

SCCS also led to Teamware. A distributed SCM toolkit that wrapped around SCCS files. Someone called Larry McVoy worked on some SCCS libraries that Teamware used. Larry went on to write his own distributed SCM tookit around SCCS called bitkeeper, which Linus then used for Linux. After some licence issues made bitkeeper untenable for Linux, Linus went and wrote his own distributed SCM... git.

There's a direct path from SCCS to git in terms of transfer of ideas and workflows, via a number of waypoints.