[demondemidi]

I was at Intel in the late 80's through the 90's. We used RCS for chip design (storing IHDL and validation test suites), and SourceSafe for any group writing windows device drivers (MASM 6.1 anybody?).

You reminded me of locking the centralized repo, I completely forgot about the headaches that caused! I'm now recalling how painful source safe was. I wonder if trauma caused me to forget.

Eventually everything migrated to SVN as part of the Linux migration, including windows desktop revision control. I was so used to the SVN/CVS patterns that I strongly resisted git later on after I'd left. I'd say it took me a good two years of grumbling before I finally opened my mind to git, and in hindsight it's brilliant. The biggest thing that I had trouble letting go of was having a monotonically increasing version number of the repo. That felt ... safe. I mean, now you just have to be liberal with tags.

I agree with the OP, git couldn't work 20 years ago on desktops because drive sizes were too small. Sure it could work on distributed computing, but AFS drives were slow, and NFS quotas were teensy. Git only worked because drive sizes exploded.