alt Hacker NewsMy favorite part of this was:
That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments
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The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s. The code ran perfectly well thanks to modern optimizing compilers and having moved from Vax to Linux in the 90s, it was a surprisingly seamless transition.
It reminds me of a conference talk I’ve referenced before “do over or make due” basically implying rewriting large amounts of mostly functioning code was not worth the effort if it could be taped together with modern tools.
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If you're using R in 2026, you're probably invoking code compiled from Fortran from the 70s/80s somewhere along the line. It's a foundation for a lot of numerical computing.
Does that mean that three-letter agencies were/are able to recruit from the fields for each type of malware? For example, fast16 might actually be written by someone who used to write scientific calculation software, while Stunex was written by someone who used to work for Siemens?
Yeah, I used to be skeptical of the government provenance of things like Stuxnet (I am not any more, I'm fully sold, like everyone else), and notes like this were why. People used RCS well into the 2000s! RCS as a tool had virtues over SVN and CVS.
>in 2006 was still using svn
Perhaps you meant cvs? Subversion was released in 2004 and git appeared in 2005.
Ha, I worked for a company that until ~2012 still used RCS-backed SCM, absolute hack job on a shared file share that wrapped RCS with a "project file" to allow a tree of specific revisions for a "project". "MKS" it was called. And by the sound of it the "old" '90s version, not the java EE rewrite.
That meant the files has the entire "$Revision: 1.3 $" nonsense and "file changelog" at the top too - though many newer files never bothered to include the tags to actually get RCS to replace them. Inconsistent as hell.
And while the "family" of devices the software was for traces it's origin to the mid '90s, functionally none of the code was older than ~5 years at that time.
Naturally even with only a few tens of engineers it regularly messed up, commits stepped on each other's toes and the entire tree got corrupted regularly. For fun I wrote a script that read it all and imported the entire history into git - you only had to go back a few years before the entire thing was absolute nonsense.
I have no idea why that was still being used then, but I assume it had been in use from the very start of that entire hardware family. Perhaps as it was fundamentally a "hardware" company - which until surprisingly recently seemed to consider "source control" to be "shared folders on remote machines" - "software" source control wasn't considered a priority.