Dick Grune is a Dutch computer scientist long associated with the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. On his own web page documenting the original CVS, he records that the idea came to him while waiting for a bus at the university, writing that “my head started to spin and I decided to draw up a big table, just fill in all the combinations and see what came of it.” He dates that table in the project ChangeLog to 14 December 1985.
Grune’s page preserves the firsthand history of the first Concurrent Versions System. He notes the initial work in late 1985 and the posting of the improved shell scripts to the comp.sources.unix newsgroup in mid-1986, making them publicly available to the Unix community of the time.
The original CVS was not a standalone storage system. By Grune’s own account it was a set of shell scripts layered on top of RCS, the Revision Control System, which it required to store the actual file revisions. His goal was to let several developers cooperate on the same set of files without constantly stepping on each other’s changes.
Grune’s scripts were later rewritten in C by others and grew into the CVS that dominated open-source version control through the 1990s. His page remains the primary record of where that lineage began.