In the early 80’s, an unnamed writer developed code on physically large CP/M machines called Quasar QDP-100s and had to use practices such as burning EPROMs, sending out technicians with tubefuls of EPROMs, or buying EPROM space on a Greyhound bus to send code out into the field.
The author also details how they would go about creating different versions of the code without the need for version control software, such as burning however many EPROMs were required and then plow forward developing code, and how this caused issues as there was no idea what code was really running in the field.
Today, the author encourages hackers not only to use version control but to go even further in important projects, such as using meta version control.
This entails using a virtual machine for all important projects as this allows the development environment to be backed up entirely as it would be when doing a release.
This allows the virtualization of the exact build environment, allowing for an exact copy of the environment 5 years later, regardless of whether the debugger still runs on the host OS or if the compiler has fixed some bugs that were relied on or added some that tripped over.
