A place I worked at did it by duplicating and modifying a function, then commenting out the existing one. The dev would leave their name and date each time, because they never deleted the old commented out functions of course, history is important.

They'd also copy the source tree around on burnt CDs, so good luck finding out who had the latest copy at any one point (Hint: It was always the lead dev, because they wouldn't share their code, so "merging to main" involved giving them a copy of your source tree on a burnt disk)

[–] i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Wasn’t it Visual SourceSafe or something like that?

God, what a revolution it was when subversion came along and we didn’t have to take turns checking out a file to have exclusive write access.

[–] mercano@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

The worst was when someone left for vacation without releasing their file locks.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Visual SourceSafe

Yes! That's the one I was struggling to remember the name of. My previous employer started on Visual SourceSafe in the 90s and migrated to Team Foundation Server (TFS) in the 2000s. There were still remnants of SourceSafe when I worked there (2010 to 2013).

I remember TFS had locks for binary files. There was one time we had to figure out how to remove locks held by an ex-employee - they were doing a big branch merge when they left the company, and left all the files locked. It didn't automatically drop the locks when their account was deleted.

They had a bunch of VB6 COM components last modified in 1999 that I'm 80% sure are still in prod today. It was still working and Microsoft were still supporting VB6 and Classic ASP, so there wasn't a big rush to rewrite it.

[–] HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Welcome to my world... our new lead architect has mandated that we move everything from TFS to GitLab before the end of the year. I hope it comes true.

[–] Flames5123@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

At the start of COVID, I migrated our three projects to git from VSS. I also wrote a doc for our other teams to do the same. It was amazing once we got it working. Small team of 3, but we started using feature branches which enabled us to easily merge everything into a testing branch and release only certain features at a time. So much cleaner.

Before I left, I almost got semi automatic CI/CD working with Jenkins!

[–] GhostlyPixel@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

My first SWE job out of college in 2019 they were still using SVN because none of the seniors could be bothered to learn how to use git.

The “well this is how we’ve always done it” attitude had a death grip on that place