Comment by lagerstedt
5 years ago
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?
I played with SCCS on RSX-11M in the 1980s. SCCS is not a client-server architecture that allows you to share file history across the internet. It allows you to keep change history locally with your local source files. If you don't keep viable backups of your local files offline and offsite, it's going to be easy to lose even if your local files contain the entire history of your changes. It was only when we moved to DOS that SCCS became useful, since you could back up and share code using floppies.
When I worked on RSX-11M, and later VMS, we did not rely on SCCS because it had no added value. We relied on the file versioning provided by the file system and rarely kept more than one old version around because disk space was always at a premium. Changes to production code required filling out a paper form and passing it to the test department, who would submit the appropriate batch job to rebuild everything, then copy your changed files into the production directories after the tests pass. It was just like modern CI systems, except for the fact that it was mostly manual and a build-and-test cycle was at least 2 days.
Quoting the 1975 paper: "There are two implementations of SCCS: one for the IBM 370 under the OS and one for the PDP 11 under UNIX."
The original version was for OS/MVT and implemented in SNOBOL4 using the SPITBOL compiler. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA084326.pdf says that SNOBOL4 was available for the RSX-11D by 1979.
I have no clue what Ericcson was using. My inference from the literature is that apparently when software developers have access to a version control system, they used it, even back in the 1970s.
FWIW, I regard versioned file systems as a form of version control.
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