🧬 A People’s History of Version Control

It started with chaos. Then came the logs. The merge wars. The broken diffs. The rise of Git. And now? We still don’t really know how rebase works.

📁 Chapter 0: "Save As v2 FINAL (REAL THIS TIME).doc"

Before version control, you saved your files like a feral animal.

• main.sh
• main_old.sh
• main_broken_but_might_work.sh
• main_final.sh
• main_final2.sh

You weren’t doing engineering. You were hoarding text.
If you broke prod, you better remember what line you changed three days ago — or just pray no one noticed.

It was tribal. It was stupid. It was… human.

💾 Chapter 1: RCS, CVS, and the Command-Line Monks

Then came the monks of early version control:
RCS and CVS.

They were built for a different time.
A time when one dev owned the repo, and if you wanted to edit app.c, you had to lock it like it was a bathroom stall.

It was slow. It was weird.
It worked — until it didn’t.

And when CVS broke, it broke ugly.

👔 Chapter 2: Subversion, or: The Corporate Years

SVN tried to fix it.
They called it Subversion, which sounded like a punk band, but it was just CVS with better hygiene.

You could commit without locking. You could branch.
Kind of.

But merging was a war crime.
Branches were feared, not embraced.
People would work for months without merging, then pray their diffs didn’t implode.

SVN was clean. Respectable. Predictable.
But Git was coming.
And Git was angry.

🧠 Chapter 3: Git and the Revenge of Linus

Linus Torvalds wrote Git in 2005 because he was pissed off.

BitKeeper — the proprietary tool Linux was using — changed their license.
So Linus did what any grumpy genius would do:
He built a new version control system in 10 days.

Distributed. Immutable. Fast. Brutal.
Git doesn’t hold your hand — it gives you a loaded gun and a manual written in Klingon.

But it worked.
It worked really well.

And it spread like gospel.

🔥 Chapter 4: The Merge Wars

Early Git was not for the faint of heart.

You had:

• Detached HEADs
• Rebase vs Merge holy wars
• git reflog as your only lifeline
• git reset --hard as a daily ritual

But once you learned it, you felt powerful.
You could jump timelines. Rewrite history.
Git turned devs into time-traveling editors of reality.

🌍 Chapter 5: GitHub and the Social Era

Then GitHub came along and said:
“Hey, what if version control... but with vibes?”

• Pull requests
• Emojis
• Profile pics
• Forks
• Likes
• README badges that shame you

Suddenly, version control wasn’t just technical. It was social.
And now every project lives in public.
Your commit history is a résumé.
Your GitHub graph is a dopamine farm.

🤖 Chapter 6: LLMs, Pair Programming, and the Ghost in the Repo

Now we’ve got:

• Copilot writing our commits
• GPT fixing merge conflicts
• AI pair-programming tools whispering in our ear

But version control still matters.
You still need to think in diffs.
You still need to write commits like a logbook, not a stream of consciousness.

Because when shit hits the fan, you won’t want a GPT summary.
You’ll want a clean commit that says:

fix: revert the thing that lit prod on fire

🧷 Final Word

Version control isn’t glamorous.
It’s not a hot new framework.
It’s not getting VC money or trending on Hacker News.

But it’s the spine of everything we do.
The invisible thread that keeps the chaos from eating us alive.

You don’t have to love Git.
But you better learn to dance with it.
Because if history tells us anything — it’s that we’ll always need a way to roll things back when we get too clever.