I learned to play computer games even before learning to switch a computer on or off, for which I sought an adult's help. The early computer games, which put us in awe even at that time, had a few frustrating moments when they wouldn't allow us to save our progress. Even if they had a save option it was a single save slot at a time, which meant you could only save your progress at the cost of your earlier save. This was a shame, because your previous save might have been at an exceptionally fun part of the game that you would like to preserve now and revisit later some day, or even worse, your present save might have been at an unwinnable situation that you want to undo.

Computer games have evolved from this state while our way of working with digitized files remains the same. Options like undo and redo help us momentarily when the file that we are working with is still open, but fail to go beyond that. You cannot just open a file and start undoing the changes that you have made before your last save to get back to an older state.

There are also several situations where we would like to maintain multiple versions of the same file. Even the most widely used way of maintaining multiple versions of a file by naming the new files sequentially, for example, Inventory_product_2011-09-21.doc, System_requirement_specification_v6.xls, and so on, become a pain as the number of versions increases because of the huge volume of the number of files that has to be maintained.

Now if you have experienced or thought about any of these situations and wondered whether there is a way to handle this better, you will be rejoicing at the end of this chapter. This is where a version control system (VCS) comes into play.