A Very Brief History of Git

Git was cre­at­ed in 2005 by Linus Tor­valds as part of the Lin­ux ker­nel project. Pri­or to using Git, the Lin­ux ker­nel team used Bit­Keep­er for ver­sion con­trol. They used Bit­Keep­er for free from 2002 until 2005, when their license for free use was end­ed by the Bit­Keep­er devel­op­er.

With the need to move to a new ver­sion con­trol sys­tem, the Lin­ux ker­nel team, and specif­i­cal­ly, Tor­valds, set out to cre­ate their VCS.

They want­ed a sys­tem that was:

• distributed/​decentralized
• fast
• could man­age mul­ti­ple branch­es in one repos­i­to­ry, at the same time (non-lin­ear development)

Git is the sys­tem they built. It start­ed out very sim­ple, with core com­mands that need­ed to be com­bined to com­plete a task. These com­mands are now known as the ​“plumb­ing.” As the project pro­gressed, the high­er lev­el com­mands — -called the ​“porce­lain” — -were added to make using Git faster and easier.