I'm assuming there was at least some scm in place before, but my few google searches haven't turned up what it was. Do you know?

*edit: Didn't look hard enough, according to this: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-A-Short-History-o... it was just files and patches from 1991-2002. Seems crazy from a modern perspective...

Yeah, check this out from 1998 (two years before OP) https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/9/30/122

Wait is this where the original idea for git came from?

Larry McVoy was the BitKeeper guy. This was early in terms of distributed version control, but I have no idea if it was the first or just (for a while) the most popular. Linus wrote git using several lessons he learned from using BitKeeper. It's not just a copy, though.

...but it totally wasn't because of what Eric Raymond said, right?

Why not?

joke - I can imagine Linus grudgingly beginning to use version control, but never admitting that Raymond's rather pointed tough love led him to do it.

Linus wasn't against version control. He thought that CVS and SVN (the leaders at the time) were just not beneficial enough for his use case. The kernel developers worked with "patches" as their unit of work and neither of these could handle them well. More fundamentally they were centralized and Linus had experience from watching the BSDs and knew that a centralized version control was actually worse than none. He both explicitly didn't want to have anymore authority or convenience than any other developer and at the same time wanted absolute authority over his own version. Neither of these were possible with CVS/SVN.

>More fundamentally they were centralized and Linus had experience from watching the BSDs and knew that a centralized version control was actually worse than none

Watching another group from the outside is not experience. But what makes you say he even had that? He's pretty consistently suggested he has no time to pay any attention to any of the BSD projects going right back to 1993.

BitKeeper, not bitbucket

d'oh, updated