In April 2005, Linus Torvalds built Git in ten days after BitKeeper revoked its free licence to the Linux kernel. Twenty-one years later, no successor has emerged. A veteran developer recounts three decades of source control, having used every major system since 1990—and lost code in most of them.

The pre-VCS era was chaotic. Developers relied on zip files with date stamps, network shares with manual versioning (FINAL, FINAL_v2, FINAL_FINAL), lock-by-email ("I'm editing UTILS.BAS, don't touch it"), and stacks of 3.5-inch floppies. When formal systems arrived, they brought new problems. SCCS and RCS introduced lock-based workflows—run co -l to edit, ci to check in—while CVS enabled concurrent edits but lacked atomic commits, suffered slow branching, and couldn't track file renames.

Microsoft shops ran Visual SourceSafe, infamous for database corruption so frequent that "restore from last night's backup" became a documented IT procedure. CVS dominated open source despite broken merges, inconsistent commits when networks failed, and branches that took minutes to create. The Linux kernel ran on BitKeeper until the licence revocation forced Torvalds to build his own solution.

Git won because it solved the exact problems practitioners had complained about for decades: cheap branching, atomic commits, distributed repositories, and rename tracking. One Finnish kernel developer created it in ten days, and twenty-one years later, every development shop uses it. The reason is structural—Git addressed what every previous system got wrong.