Comment by sverhagen
5 years ago
I have been in two different situations many years ago, neither of which I take responsibility for, ha-ha:
1. Contractor relationship gone sour, turned out they had withheld source code from us. This lead to a dispute regarding the code ownership. Meanwhile we were running the corresponding binaries in the wild. We ended up reverse engineering the missing parts.
2. Source code is centrally managed on a server, hard disk failure, restore not working or backups wholly missing, don't remember. This was the pre-git era, probably Visual SourceSafe, which was entirely centralized.
For me personally, let's just say I feasted my eyes and learned a lot. But I wager that there is still a lot of companies vulnerable in very similar ways today.
Sourcesafe is a 90-era product. PDP-11 was discontinued long before Sourcesafe was even released.
There were version control software around in the 70’s but I do not think that the adoption rate was very high. I think it’s reasonable to assume that they didn’t use it in this case.
The SCCS paper (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6312866 ) says the adoption rate at Bell Labs was high.
> The Programmer's Workbench has proven to be very popular with both management and programmers, and is now used by almost all software projects at the author's installation.
The followup paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800283.811111 at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800283.811111 comments:
> SCCS is used extensively within Bell Laboratories. For example, at one installation more than 3 million lines of source code are controlled with sccs. These 3 million lines represent 5000 files and the work of approximately 500 programmers. Additionally, sccs is used at many installations outside the Bell System.
> The SCCS paper (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6312866 ) says the adoption rate at Bell Labs was high.
So, SCCS runs under Unix. The software package we are talking about here is Ericsson JZA715, written mostly in Pascal with a bit of PDP-11 assembler, running under RSX-11M, it was first put into operation in Oslo in 1979. I don't know what development platform Ericsson was using, but I doubt it was Unix, seems far more likely to have been RSX-11. What version control systems would Ericsson have been using on RSX-11 in the 1970s? I doubt it was SCCS – could it have been something else? Anything? RSX-11 has a versioned file system, could they have just used that? Or did people build more advanced version control systems layered on top of that base?
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