the core concurrency piece of the shell script version (which was brilliant and ahead of its time), ended up being 239 lines of shell script code. My version of it, in C, weighed in at 289 lines of code, and I only recall extending it to handle directories (making CVS recursive was one of the killer feature additions)

CVS would not have been as successful had it not been a key part of the early Open Source movement. I nurtured CVS, part-time, for a couple of years past the first release. Jeff Polk helped me rewrite the internals of CVS during this time - he was a better programmer than I would ever be.