SCCS REVISION HISTORY

[Rob Lemley]

In <1990Oct29.053733.20959 at iecc.cambridge.ma.us> johnl at iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:

>In article <1990Oct28.190212.21838 at eci386.uucp> woods at eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) writes:
>>Sccs is covered by the Berkeley Software Distribution copyright, and
>>is essentially freeware.

>That's hard to believe.  SCCS was written at Bell Labs for PWB.  Every
>version I've ever seen looks to be largely unchanged from the original code.
>Perhaps you're thinking of RCS which is now under the Gnu copyleft.

Greg Woods was writing about the SCCS frontend command called "sccs" written
by Eric Allman of Berkeley (late 70's to 1980?).

A bit of history:

RCS was written by Walter F. Tichy, Purdue University (Copyright 1982).

The original (prototype) implementation of SCCS (not the frontend sccs)
was started in 1972 on the IBM 370 under OS/MVT, coded in SNOBOL4, using
the SPITBOL compiler.  SCCS was originally designed by Marc J. Rochkind
and D.A. Nowitz at Bell Labs.

The current(?) implementation of SCCS was written for PWB circa 1973 on the
PDP 11/45 under Unix.

REFERENCES:
 Marc J Rochkind, "The Source Code Control System",
 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol SE-1(4), 364-370, Dec 1975.

 Walter F. Tichy, "RCS -- A System for Version Control",
 Software--Practice and Experience, Vol 15(7), 637-654, Jul 1985.

--
Rob Lemley
System Consultant, Scanning Software, Intergraph, Huntsville, AL
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