Revision control concepts: git for hardware
The hardware engineering discipline has come a long way over the last half-century. Gone are the days of taping out a PCB design and keeping designs in a physical flat-file cabinet. New solutions throughout the decades required IT staff to create and manage network locations to store designs. Still, the maintenance and upkeep of the designs were on the honors system, and each design was only as robust as the weakest member of the team. Even if files had an ultimate destination, they were often passed around on “sneakernet” with code reaching systems on floppy disks or thumb drives. Many engineers used informal and ad-hoc release processes where they would zip their files and tack on revision numbers whenever they forgot something and needed to add it later.
