[szvsw]

As someone who wrote my first line of code in approx 2010 and used git & GH for the first time in… 2013? it kind of amazes me to remember that Git is only 20 years old. GitHub for instance doesn’t seem surprising to me that is <20 years old, but `git` not existing before 2005 somehow always feels shocking to me. Obviously there were other alternatives (to some extent) for version control, but git just has the feeling of a tool that is timeless and so ingrained in the culture that it is hard to imagine (for me) the idea of people being software developers in the post-mainframe age without it. It feels like something that would have been born in the same era as Vim, SSH, etc (ie early 90s). This is obviously just because from the perspective of my programming consciousness beginning, it was so mature and entrenched already, but still.

I’ve never used other source control options besides git, and I sometimes wonder if I ever will!

[eterm]

What surprises me more is how young Subversion is in comparison to git, it's barely older.

I guess I started software dev at a magic moment pre-git but after SVN was basically everywhere, but it felt even more like it had been around forever vs the upstart git.

[mrlonglong]

I'm old enough to have used RCS. Very primitive and CVS was soon in use. Git is a breath of fresh air compared to these ones.

[wink]

It's always hard to describe the minutiae of things happening in the span of just a couple of years, but I think you're overly broad here.

Wikipedia tells me the initial release of Subversion was in late 2000, and for git it was 2005 - but although those were kinda just smack in the middle of my first years online, learning to code, starting with FLOSS work, and so on - I think those years were pretty important with the shift to the WWW and then web 2.0.

I basically don't remember a world without SVN, but that's probably because I just missed the cutoff and projects and companies were migrating from CVS from 2002 on or so, because the model was very similar and while it wasn't drop in, it made sense.

For git I want to say it took just a little longer, and the decentralized model was so different that people were hesitant, and before github in 2009 (I know it was founded in 2008, but my user id is below 50000 and it felt very much new and not at all widespread in non-rails circles before that) I would have called it a bit niche, actually - so it's more like a 7year span. But of course I was living in my bubble of university, and working for 2 small companies and as a freelancer in that time. I think bigger FLOSS projects only started migrating in droves after 2010/2011. But of course my timeline could be just as wrong :D

[pests]

Yeah, odd to learn. I remember dipping my toes into source control, playing around with CVS and SVN right around when git was originally announced and it felt so "modern" and "fresh" compared to these legacy systems I was learning.

[cryptonector]

> What surprises me more is how young Subversion is in comparison to git, it's barely older.

Subversion was so awful that it had to be replaced ASAP.