[blep_]

I do not understand how teams work without source control. I don't mean that (only) in the "WTF are you doing, I don't understand why you would do that" colloquial sense. I literally cannot conceive how they work.

Do people just... change files and then email the whole file to the other developers and hope nobody else was working on that file? Do they at least have patches?

[colomon]

First professional software development I did, we didn't even have hard drives or networking. Luckily I was the only developer and it wasn't a huge problem.

First place I worked with other people, we at least had hard drives. I don't think we had networking on the machines or version control. For sure there was only one or two machines in the office that could reach the Internet. Mostly only one person could work on a file at a time.

When we did get more employees, a LAN, and version control a few years on, the mid-1990s Microsoft version control software was such a piece of junk it mostly amounted to a formal digital system specifying who the one person who could work on a given file was...

[908B64B197]

I've seen people exchanging thumb drives.

No concept of a patch. They spent most of the afternoon and evening "performing the manual merge and stabilizing the release", meaning rebuilding and deleting lines until it compiled.

I wish I was kidding.

[Jtsummers]

Email would actually be better than what I have actually seen because it gives a pseudo-version control system, patches or no:

Shared drives and folders with concurrent edits. Sometimes they'd separate them into "mine/2023.02.14" and "yours/2022.12.10" but that wasn't much better. Actually, because people don't seem to grok lexicographical order, or how to write dates at all, the dates are normally 10-12-2022 and 2-14-2023, guess whether the first one was from October or December.