Generation of Version Control System

Just a brief of version control system

Necessity is the mother of invention

In 1972, people from bell labs developed the first version of the Version Control System named SCSS which they used for UNIX development. Which led to the birth of different generations. Below you can find the brief of different generations, if you are interested in learning more about those tools, please check out this initial commit blog.

First Generation

The first generation VCS were intended to track changes for individual files and checked-out files could only be edited locally by one user at a time.

They were built on the assumption that all users would log into the same shared Unix host with their own accounts.

1. SCSS

2. RCS

Second Generation

Introduced networking which led to centralized repositories that contained the 'official' versions of their projects.

Third Generation

The third generation is a distributed version control system, where we have each repository for the user to develop features and then we have one centralized repo to merge our features.

In the time of the third generation, BitKeeper was created. It's a proprietary and closed-source software developed by Larry McVoy.