Key dates in Hardware/Software Configuration Management History

Listed below are some key dates in the development of SCM.

Note: The dates are based on information generally available on the Internet. Please update if you have additions or more reliable information. See History of CM Discussion for commentary

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Table of Contents - (Generated automatically from sections below)

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1964 The Labour Distribution System [Milton S.Bryce and R.W.Bemer, UNIVAC]

Comment: Inception of Production Control & Peer Review, which lead to the 1968 Software Factory. Key components of the Production control model included classification of relationships, change request and approval, structure and revision estimation.

1968 The Software Factory [R.W.Bemer of General Electric]

Comment: First Nato Conference discusses development of a software factory. The 1968 paper suggested that General Electric develop a software factory to reduce variability in programmer productivity through standardised tools, a computer-based interface, and a historical database useful for financial and management controls

1969 IBM CLEAR/CASTER System [Brown]

Comment: IBM's presentation on the first Software Library System (Nato Conference 1969). Note: Clear/Caster Maintains a DB of programs, specifications, documentation and messages, using deltas.

1971 FUNDAMENTALS OF CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT [Samaras & Czerwinski]

From the preface: "The purpose of this book is to describe the fundamentals of configuration management so that engineering students, designers, engineers, project managers, and administrative personnel can have a common language for working effectively with their configuration management counterparts ---"

1972 SCCS [Marc Rochkind at Bell Telephone Laboratories]

Comment: Source Code Control systems

1977: CCC (Change and Configuration Control) [Leon Presser, Softool Corporation]

Comment: Based on PhD thesis for Change and Configuration Control in early 70's. Originally contracted by Hughes Aircraft (Now Raytheon) to create a standard mechanism and process for tracking and controlling changes to and differences between two aircraft engines from a single baseline. The engines eventually went into the Navy F-14 and AirForce? F-15 which are basically branched from one original development baseline.

Additional Notes: Softool was acquired by PLATINUM Technology in 1997. PLATINUM was acquired by Computer Associates? in 1999. CCC/LCM (Life Cycle Manager) was spun off to Allen Systems Group? under direction of the US Dept of Justice prior to the CA acquisition. CCC/Harvest is now branded as AllFusion Harvest Change Manager. A customized version of the the original CCC product is reportedly still in use by the Navy to manage all the components of the F-14 and other aircraft.

1982 CMS (DEC)

Comment: Code Management System for VAX/VMS. Supports grouping of file versions into classes.

1982 RCS [Walter F Tichy of Purdue University]

Comment: The Revision Control System

Circa 1982/83 - version management functions added to CAD tools

-- BobVentimiglia? - 12 Jan 2003

1983 GNU Project

Comment: Launch of the free Software Foundation.

1984 DSEE [David LeBlang, Apollo]

Comment: Originally on Apollo systems (became HP), Later superseded by ClearCase Comment: DSEE was built on top of Domain, the Apollo operating system (with a typed file system). It stood for Domain Software Engineering Environment. I would have purchased it if they had had a decent (binary compatible) Intel 808x cross compiler, but they never got one, so we (at Sanders Associates) had to go with Vax/VMS. DSEE built version management and workspace isolation into the operating system - ahead of its time. The Ada Project Support Environment (APSE) was supposed to wind up in a similar place, but never got there. Apollo was acquired by HP and the DSEE team was allowed to go private as Atria and created ClearCase from DSEE. This is one reason why, on Unix, a kernel change to create a multiple version file system (MVFS) is needed. Domain had it, Unix didn't. -- BobVentimiglia? - 12 Jan 2003 -- MarcGirod - 20 Feb 2004 (minor edit)

1985 SHERPA by Sherpa, Corp (bankrupted in 2000/01, I think assets acquired by EDS).

Comment: the first and only commercial tool to implement CM combined with Process Enactment (when you login to a project, you only get access to the tools selected for use during the phase the project is in). -- BobVentimiglia? - 12 Jan 2003

1986 CVS original Shell Script [Dick Grune]

Comment: RCS front-end, Supporting parallel/concurrent changes to files

1988 Filenet coined the term "workflow"

Comment: Filenet, a mfg, of optical disk storage management systems coined the term "workflow" as applied to the banking and insurance industry scanning of paper, reviewing and approval processing of the resulting "electronic" paper. The term was soon picked up by the CAD/PDM industry. -- BobVentimiglia? - 12 Jan 2003

1989 ADC [Richard Harter]

Comment: Heavily based on Change-Sets, Later became True Change

1989 CVS Program [Brian Berliner]

Comment: RCS front-end, Supporting parallel/concurrent changes to files.

1995 Wiki [Ward Cunningham]

Comment: Web Based Collaboration sitting on top of RCS engine

1999 WEBDAV RFC2518 is issued

Comment: Web Based Distributed Authoring Standard

2002 WEBDAV RFC3253 is issued

Comment: Web Based Distributed Authoring and Versioning Standard

2002 Subversion - Alpha Release

Comment: Open Source, C (not Java) Based CVS Re-Write & Extensions.

2004 Subversion - 1.0.0 release

Comment : see http://subversion.tigris.org/ -- Stefano Spinucci - 4 Sep 2004

-- NiallCrawford? - 30 Dec 2002