Software developer collaboration in the 1980's

[fastgear]

Greetings

I recently stumbled across this video: https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

This video is about how Soundtracker evolved on the Amiga.

Although the cracking and reverse engineering of the original commercial software was probably not so legal , it is still amazing to see, with the combined effort of many volunteers, how the freeware version eventually outshined the original commercial product with regards to bugfixes and features.

I am curious to know if they had any tools available back in the day that assisted with the merging of code from so many developers. These days we with tools like Github and SVN, which makes merging code changes from different developers quite easy, but I am not so sure if they had similar tools back in the day of the Amiga, albeit an offline version.

Is anyone aware of any tools they used in the 1980's for merging software among developers on the Amiga?

[GARTHWILSON]

There must have been such tools used by Berkeley Softworks when they developed GEOS for the C64, and GeoPaint, GeoWrite, etc., which were apparently developed by a team of eight. Visicalc for the Apple II was apparently the product of only two people, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, and Appleworks for Apple II was done all by a single person, Rupert Lissner.

[Sean]

If they were developing on a Unix platform, there would have been the diff tool. Some of the editors could accept the output from diff to perform interactive merges, and I think automated merges were possible with some of them.

[BigEd]

diff3 dates from 1979, apparently, and can manage merging.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3

But I think many people were familiar with diff and patch - patch dates from 1985. (Mildly surprising!)

[barrym95838]

I never used SCCS in college, but it was definitely available in the mid-1980s on the campus' Ultrix-32 VAX 11/780, and some of my geekier friends were proficient in its use.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

fastgear wrote:

Greetings

I recently stumbled across this video: https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

This video is about how Soundtracker evolved on the Amiga.

Although the cracking and reverse engineering of the original commercial software was probably not so legal , it is still amazing to see, with the combined effort of many volunteers, how the freeware version eventually outshined the original commercial product with regards to bugfixes and features.

I am curious to know if they had any tools available back in the day that assisted with the merging of code from so many developers. These days we with tools like Github and SVN, which makes merging code changes from different developers quite easy, but I am not so sure if they had similar tools back in the day of the Amiga, albeit an offline version.

Is anyone aware of any tools they used in the 1980's for merging software among developers on the Amiga?

SCCS has been available on UNIX since the mid-1970s—I first encountered it in 1980, when I got some time on a PDP-11 running UNIX. SCCS is date-and-time-aware, and knows about versioning. SCCS can be used individually or cooperatively.

[fastgear]

Thanks everyone. It makes sense that they probably used a tool like patch/diff.

These kind of history always interest me.