Before Git, software development was a study in friction. Every team had its own repository server, its own rules, its own naming conventions. You didn’t “clone” a project—you begged permission to access it. You didn’t “merge” code—you negotiated for ownership of a file. Collaboration moved at the speed of bureaucracy.

The systems of the time—CVS, RCS, Subversion—did their best. They provided structure, but only just. These tools treated code like a library book: one person could check it out, edit it, and return it. That worked when teams were small, but once the internet arrived, the model cracked. Open source exposed its limits brutally. Dozens of contributors couldn’t share one centralized gatekeeper without chaos.

Then, in 2005, the Linux kernel community hit a crisis. They lost access to their proprietary version control system and needed something better—fast. Linus Torvalds, frustrated by slow tools and fragile centralization, built Git in a matter of weeks. His design choices were pragmatic but revolutionary.

First, Git was distributed. Every developer had a full copy of the repository, complete with its entire history. No more central bottleneck. Second, Git used snapshots, not diffs. Each commit was a complete state of the project, linked cryptographically to its ancestors. That made it nearly impossible to corrupt or lose data. Third, Git was fast—absurdly fast. Merging and branching, once slow and error-prone, became trivial operations.

That trifecta changed everything. Suddenly, developers could experiment freely. They could fork, branch, and rewrite history without fear. Collaboration became parallel instead of serial. Open-source projects like Linux, then GitHub itself, built on this momentum. The industry never looked back.

But the real shift wasn’t technical—it was cultural. Git taught a generation of engineers that experimentation is reversible. Mistakes weren’t catastrophic; they were recoverable. You could explore an idea without jeopardizing the main line. That single principle reshaped not just workflows but attitudes. It turned software into a living conversation instead of a static product.

Looking back, those early version control systems were the training wheels of digital collaboration. Git removed them. It allowed creativity to scale.

Today, we take that freedom for granted. But remembering the chaos before Git helps us appreciate the order it created—and reminds us that structured change is what makes innovation sustainable.

Jorge Luis de la Torre — I put the C in GRC. I bring compliance to the table.