Arthur Barrett pointed out on info-cvs that CVS is 20 years old today. You can see Dick Grune’s first post about CVS made back on July 3, 1986, including the original CVS shell scripts, here.
It’s a testament to the resilience of this tool that its still going strong, under active development , and most probably enjoying a sizeable market share (see this dodgy, old, unrepresentative survey).
Subversion, long telegraphed as the CVS Killer, sure is taking its time. No mercy killing, this one.
To put 1986 back into the frame:
- Challenger explodes in January. Chernobyl explodes in April.
- Apple introduces the Mac plus, with a whopping 1 meg of memory.
- The first Compaq 386 ships.
- Steve Jobs
co-foundsbuys Pixar for $10 million. First public appearance in signature turtleneck. (okay, made that bit up). - Microsoft lists on the stock exchange at $21 a share. (split-adjusted value per share today is $209.701).
- MS-DOS 3.2 ships.
- Perl is still 1 year away.
- James Gosling is 3 years into his employment with Sun. He (with David Rosenthal) publishes a paper titled “A Window-Manager for Bitmapped Displays and Unix”.
Dick Grune’s site has a short description of how CVS came about on his site.
1 I am not a financial advisor. Don’t sell your MSFT stock on the basis of this calculation. Don’t buy it either.
Pixar was founded as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm that was launched in 1979 with the hiring of Edwin Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). The group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs after he left Apple. He paid US$5 million to George Lucas and put US$5 million as capital into the company. — jm Jul 4, 12:35 AM #