Source Code Control System (SCCS) is an early revision control system, geared toward program source code and other text files. It was originally developed in SNOBOL at Bell Labs in 1972 by Marc J. Rochkind for an IBM System/370 computer running OS/360 MVT. It was later rewritten by him in C for UNIX, then running on a PDP-11, and released with the Programmer's Workbench (PWB) edition of that operating system.
Subsequently, SCCS was included in AT&T's commercial System III and System V distributions. It was not licensed with 32V, the ancestor to Berkeley Unix. The SCCS command set is now part of the Single UNIX Specification.
SCCS was the dominant version control system for Unix until the release of the Revision Control System (RCS). Today, SCCS is generally considered obsolete. However, its file format is still used internally by a few other revision control programs, including BitKeeper and TeamWare. The latter is a frontend to SCCS. Sablime has been developed from a modified version of SCCS but uses a history file format that is incompatible with SCCS. The SCCS file format uses a storage technique called interleaved deltas (or the weave). This storage technique is now considered by many revision control system developers as foundational to advanced merging and versioning techniques, such as the "Precise Codeville" ("pcdv") merge.
Apart from fixing some Year 2000 problems in 1999, there is no active development on the various UNIX vendor specific SCCS versions. In 2006, Sun Microsystems (today part of Oracle Corporation) released their Solaris version of SCCS as open source under the Common Development and Distribution License as part of their efforts to open-source Solaris.
SCCS is also known for the sccsid string, for example:
This string contains the file name, date, and can also contain a comment. After compilation, this string can be found in binary and object files by looking for the pattern "@(#)" and can be used determine which source code files were used during compilation.
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