Editing Revision Control System (section)

=== Development ===
RCS was first released in 1982<ref name=":1">{{cite journal
| last = Tichy | first = Walter
| title = Design, implementation, and evaluation of a Revision Control System
| journal = ICSE '82 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software Engineering
| year = 1982 | pages = 58–67
| url = http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=807748
| access-date = 12 June 2012
}}</ref>
by [[Walter F. Tichy]] at [[Purdue University]]. It was an alternative tool to the then-popular [[Source Code Control System]] (SCCS) which was nearly the first version control software tool (developed in 1972 by early Unix developers).<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/version-control/version-control.html|title=Understanding Version-Control Systems (DRAFT)|first=Eric|last=Raymond|website=www.catb.org|access-date=2017-02-13}}</ref> RCS is currently maintained by the [[GNU Project]].<ref>{{cite web |title = RCS|website = GNU Project|publisher = Free Software Foundation|access-date = 27 June 2015|url = https://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/|date = 22 January 2015}}</ref>

An innovation in RCS is the adoption of ''reverse deltas''. Instead of storing every revision in a file like SCCS does with [[interleaved deltas]], RCS stores a set of edit instructions to go back to an earlier version of the file. Tichy claims that it is faster for most cases because the recent revisions are used more often.<ref name=":1"/>