As I mentioned in another post, I'm writing an invited paper for an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering that will be a 50-year retrospective of my original 1975 SCCS paper (
mrochkind.com/aup/talks/SCCS-Slideshow.pdf). Can some people here review a couple of paragraphs for accuracy?
Decentralized Version Control (DVCS)
While VCSs like CVS and Subversion were centralized and had pre-commit merging, a further advance was towards decentralization, with post-commit merging. Probably the first DVCS was Sun WorkShop TeamWare, created by Larry McVoy and announced in 1992 [sun]. It was implemented as a layer on top of SCCS. McVoy later commercialized a successor system called BitKeeper [Bitkeeper], which was layered on a re-implementation of SCCS, which he called BitSCCS. TeamWare and BitKeeper took advantage of the interleaved delta algorithm, also known as a weave, to implement an efficient way to represent merged deltas by reference, instead of reproducing code inside the repository. This is a lot more complicated to do with reverse deltas, introduced by RCS.
In 2005 Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux [linux], invented the DVCS Git [git] for Linux development, and since then Git has become widely used and has supplanted BitKeeper.
I don't want to add more detail that would make these paragraphs any longer, but I do want them to be accurate. Thanks!