Week 5 Lab: A Pre-VCS Artefact

Find a real object or document that tracks versions or changes without version-control software, and say precisely what mechanism it uses

22 March 2027

Before the session#

Find something that isn’t software doing version control’s job: a Track-Changes document, a redlined contract, a marked-up PDF, a physical receipt with a carbon copy, a manuscript edition with footnoted variant readings, a returned essay with margin corrections. It has to actually exist. Describe the mechanism from the real object, not from how you imagine such a thing would work.

In the session#

For each artefact: what exactly marks a change as a change (colour, a strikethrough, a footnote number, a second physical sheet), who gets attributed for it, and how far back the mechanism lets you reconstruct history: one step back, or all the way to the original. Some mechanisms turn out to only support one reviewer at a time; some support no attribution at all beyond “someone changed this.”

Afterwards#

Name the one capability a real version-control system would add that your artefact’s mechanism lacks: merging two reviewers’ changes automatically, say, or comparing any two points in the history rather than just the current state against the original. Next week looks at how a machine actually produces that comparison.