[lasereyes136]

True story, I was around in the 1990s so I was aware of those practices. Really advanced people would have a scheduled job running every hour (or on some basis) to keep an old copy just in case it was needed, usually a zip or tar file. So, a really crude versioning system.

Fast forward to 2008 and I am working on a project where we had an older person working on the project that would do this, use a scheduler to create a zip version. The younger guys I worked with said it was a crazy system and didn't understand why someone would do that. I told him it was an advanced practice just 10 years ago. Basically, people did a lot of stuff that would seem crazy now given the tools we have now.

[ta1243]

> I told him it was an advanced practice just 10 years ago

This is a problem that can affect everyone, especially those working in more isolated areas. You come out with a great workflow in year X that's 5 years ahead of the industry, and it works, so you never progress.

Meanwhile the industry catches up, solving the problem another way, but you never learn because it's a step backwards, until it isn't, and then it's a massive learning curve.

You have to actively keep up with what the industry is doing and be willing to adopt the new ways of working even when they are in some ways a step backwards.

[eru]

Goldman Sachs set up continuous integration (with automated testing etc) back in the late 1990s / early 2000s for the eco-system of their in-house language 'Slang'. Great system, way ahead of its time. (The language was also pretty neat for its time. You can tell that the people who came up with had a Lisp background. Think of it as a worse version of today's Python. And probably on par or ahead of 1990s Python.)

In any case, because of when they built that Continuous Integration system, it was all jerry-rigged on top of CVS. Problem is, they were still using that system for Slang 15 years later.