[sumtechguy]

SourceSafe was rather nice with its integration too. Right from the GUI (amazing!). The downside to SourceSafe was its tendency to randomly corrupt things and then you get to deal with that for the rest of the day instead of working on things.

Locking had some nice side effects. The devs talked to each other. Things where someone was getting in the way all the time showed where the code needed to be abstracted better. In practice it was not that big of a deal (all in 1995).

[SoftTalker]

I worked on a project that used SourceSafe for several years. Never recall any corruption.

What was really different from today though is that most developers did NOT run the application locally or in an individual environment. They all worked together in a common dev environment. It was either too difficult or impossible to run copies of the application locally. So that is why file locking was used. You had an entire team of developers simultaneously working on the same set of files.

[sumtechguy]

That was not my exp at all. We ran out of our local source dir. Think my manager would have had a fit if the checkout failed to build on his machine. We tried to keep our dev machines as close to what an end user was going to end up with and keep all the devs in sync with each other. So if an issue came up you could have a few people look at it.

You could also 'break the lock' locally then fix it up later (though this was discouraged). It also kind of forced you to make sure what you checked in built. As you would have 5 other devs coming over to ask why you broke the build. It was a manual process. Most of that sort of thing is handled by CI/CD type systems now. You can break the build on your branch. But no merging up of that junk...

We used a rudimentary CI/CD to enforce 'always builds and runs'. Someone wrote a bit of script that would check it out at 5PM and kick the build on a 'blessed' machine. If that failed the people who checked it in were on point to fix it the next morning.

It was not better or worse. It was just different and more manual. Manual though means steps get forgotten or skipped.