Pretty cool that Linus Torvalds invented a completely distributed version control system and 20 years later we all use it to store our code in a single place.
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If you weren't connected to the internet, you couldn't do a thing. You couldn't checkout. You couldn't commit. You could create branches. The only thing on your computer was whatever you checked out last time you were connected to the server.
People talk about SVN, but it wasn't that common in 2005. None of the project hosting platforms (like SourceForge) supported SVN, they were all still offering CVS. If you wanted to use SVN, you had to set it up on your own server. (From memory, google code was the first to offer SVN project hosting in mid-2006). Not that SVN was much better than CVS. It was more polished, but shared all the same workflow flaws.
Before Git (and friends), nothing like pull-requests existed. If you wanted to collaborate with someone else, you either gave them an account on your CVS/SVN server (and then they could create a branch and commit their code), or they sent you patch files over email.
The informal email pull requests of git were an improvement... though you still needed to put your git repo somewhere public. Github and its web-based pull requests were absolutely genius. Click a button, fork the project, branch, hack, commit, push, and then create a formal "pull request". It was nothing like centralised project management systems before it. A complete breath of fresh air.
2006 appears to be the year that SVN finally became somewhat mainstream, which is interesting because git was released in 2005. Github launched in 2008 and by 2009, everyone seemed to be abandoning SVN.
It feels like SVN was only really "mainstream" for about 3 years, Maybe 5 years at most; There was some early-adopter lead-up and then a long tail of repos refusing to switch to git.