@tip @stux

Yeah, I was just starting as a programmer in the late 80s as those top loading disk pack drives were phasing out. Spent a couple of weekends helping copy the weekly master source locally at a UK off shore site that had been flown over from the main US based outfit on 3 or maybe 5 of those disk assemblies.

Seems almost inconceivable now that the only way to keep the various remote sites in sync was to spend thousands of dollars a week flying 20 or 30 kg of disk platters across the Atlantic containing every line of the product source code, especially as they weren't encrypted and could have been intercepted with only a little effort.