Yes, development was being done in SVN but it was a huge pain. Continuous communication was required with the server (history lookups took ages, changing a file required a checkout, etc.) and that was just horribly inefficient for distributed teams. Even within Europe, much more so when cross-continent.
A DVCS was definitely required. And I would say git won out due to Linus inventing and then backing it, not because of a platform that would serve it.
I am not sure, it seems I did misremember. Though it's possible I was actually working with needs-lock files. I can definitely see a certain coworker from that time to put this on all files :/
And even in P4, you could checkout files only at the end, kind of like `git add`. Though this could provide some annoyance if someone had locked the file in the upstream.
I think it would be better suited to use the terms we use for natural languages. A natural language is dead when the last person who learned it as first language dies and are extinct when there is noone that would speak it at all.
In these terms, telnet has been dead for a long while, but it's extinct now.
Even that's argued within linguistics. There are languages which survive for generations as secondary languages (especially trade languages as Swahili or Chinook Jargon appear to have been originally). Also some like Latin, Hebrew and Sanskrit which survive for centuries but not as native languages.
That said, the above article does use extinction and death somewhat interchangably later on, but I suppose it's almost the same for small languages that nobody learns who is not a native speaker.
There are plenty of languages which exist without much in the way of L1 speakers. Esperanto, for example, although it does have a handful of native speakers. Many people speak English as a non-native language, particularly in places like India or Nigeria. Swahili was originally a trade language few folk spoke and even today, many of its speakers are L2.
I can speak and read some Manx. I personally don't believe it died in the 1970s. Not only do we have continuity from that time, there are people around today who learnt theirs off native speakers (in one case they were his close relatives.) It helps that we have many recordings, writings etc and it is also closely related to two languages which are in slightly better shape.
Latin and Hebrew were in use within the Middle Ages to a substantial level and used to communicate between people as a common language sometimes. Hebrew is now revived, but is Latin? A few people have spoken it as their first language over the last century or two.
While original IBM PCs indeed may not have had HDDs, it did become a standard for PC XT, as early as 1983. Only the cheapest version were without a HDD by the end of the 1980s.
My first PC, bought in late 1986, was a Leading Edge Model D, with two 360K floppy drives and no hard drive. I wrote a script to put COMMAND.COM and some other key files on a RAM disk on boot so I didn't have to keep the DOS floppy in the A: drive all the time. IIRC they had come out with a model that had a 20 MB hard drive but it was more than I could afford.
MIT, where I was at school then, had some IBM PC XTs with 10 MB hard drives, but most of their computer resources were time-sharing DEC VAX machines. You could go to one of several computer labs to get on a terminal, or even dial into them--I did the latter from my PC (the one above) using a 2400 baud modem, which was fast for the time.
Reminds me of a silly thing that happened when I was a freshman in high school, ca. 1992.
We had a dumb "computer literacy" class taught in an computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25s with no hard drives, and were each issued a bootable floppy disk containing both Microsoft Works and our assignment files (word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc.), which we turned in at the end of class for grading.
We started Works in the usual way, by typing "works" at the MS-DOS prompt.
One day, out of boredom, I added "PROMPT Password:" to AUTOEXEC.BAT on my disk, changing the DOS prompt from "A:\>" to "Password:" when booted from my disk.
Two days later, I got called into the dean's office, where the instructor demanded to know how I used my disk to "hack the network" — a network that, up until this point, I didn't even know existed, as the lab computers weren't connected to anything but power — and "lock me out of my computer", and threatened suspension unless and until I revealed the password.
After a few minutes trying to explain that no password existed to a "computer literacy" instructor who clearly had no idea what either AUTOEXEC.BAT or the DOS prompt was, nor why booting a networked computer from a potentially untrustworthy floppy disk was a terrible idea, I finally gave in.
Those 10mb full-height mfm drives were so slow... you could literally turn the computer on... go make yourself something to drink, finish your first cup, pour a second and you'd be getting the to DOS prompt right around the time it finished booting.
The irony, it was actually faster doublespaced/stacked.
Keep in mind that a lot of this depends on the location.
In Russia, we had class full of IBM PCs without hard drives in school - you had to juggle floppies - and that was early 90s. And that was a fancy school.
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