30 years ago? That was 1989. How many companies were using source control in 1989? How about 1999? Still not very many. 2009? Well, now you will find quite a few using SVN, but Git hasn't really taken off yet.
They did use SCCS, RCS, and CVS, and also commercial SCMs such as PVCS. There were also file systems with integrated revision support on VAX/VMS and other "midrange" systems such as Norsk Data/SINTRAN. Of course, most people were applying adhoc "Cognac" SCM: rename your old revisions by appending ".old", ".vo" (very old), ".xo" (extra old) and so on until it becomes untenable, store individual customer builds, etc.
> There were also file systems with integrated revision support on VAX/VMS and other "midrange" systems such as Norsk Data/SINTRAN.
Versioned file systems were developed for source code management and go back to ITS and TENEX in the late 1960s. So version control as we know it, as a widespread (at least in the DEC world) practice dates back to the 1970s.
I take your point but by 1989 there was at least 10 years or so of history in industry with source control. Granted it had not seen universal adoption.
In 1989? Lots of RCS shops who had recently moved to CVS and were excited about the "C" part...
My first engineering job, 1984. All source code was in version control (SCCS wrapped in some tracking tools) and all bugs were tracked. By 1989 we were doing root cause analysis on all defects.
