I've heard the story before but this was still fun to read. I didn't realise quite how rudimentary the first versions of git were. It really makes you wonder: was git the last opportunity to establish a ubiquitous version control system? Will there ever be another opportunity? Regardless of git's technical merits, one thing I'm extremely happy about is that it's free software. It seemed to come just before an avalanche of free software and really changed the way things are done (hopefully for good).
Git was built around supporting the linux kernel email lists. And while there are a number of other options out there that sprang up around the same time, many of them didn't fill the core need for git at that time - to reduce the stress / workload on Linus.
