Comment by aa-jv

Back in the days when having your own tape reel for storing code was a thing (an upgrade from punch-cards), we used to do this .. write the first version of the code, stream it to tape, enhance the code some more, produce a diff, write the diff to tape, and on and .. on and on .. such that, to restore a working copy of a codebase, we'd rewind the tape "sync;sync;sync" and then progressively apply every diff as it was loaded from the stream. Every few months or so, we'd rewind the tape and stream the updated code to the front of it, and repeat the process again .. it was kind of fun to think that the whole tape had a working history.

These days of course we just use git, but there was a day that we could see the progress of a codebase by watching the diffs as they streamed in off the reels ..