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My first contact was VMS with its versioning file system. Then RCS - before that we copied zip files around.

In the 80s, I implemented the use of VAX Code Management System (CMS) on a large commericial avionics software project. Made me a little more confident when later flying a particular Boeing plane.

I had been at Purdue when Walter Tichy built RCS. I discovered in my first job that businesses lagged the state of the art more than I ever imagined.

On the other hand, I was later at Rational who then bought ClearCase. Argh...

What a history!

I was convinced that VMS's versioned files thing was DEC's cunning plan to sell more disk drive space (though I didn't and still don't know what the underlying mechanism was) - I was quite glad when I learned how to turn it off, though.

Versioned files existed in Tenex, developed by Bolt Beranek and Newman in the early 1970s; version numbering was based on a similar feature in MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System. DEC's variant of Tenex was eventually called TOPS-20. Many features of VAX/VMS were influenced by Tenex/Tops-20.

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