Sun WorkShop TeamWare
| Company type | Software |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software development |
| Founded | November 1992 |
| Founder | Evan Adams (architectural design lead) |
| Fate | Discontinued |
| Products | Distributed source code revision control system |
| Owner | Sun Microsystems |
Sun WorkShop TeamWare—which was subsequently renamed Forte TeamWare and later Forte Code Management Software—is a distributed source code revision control system created by Sun Microsystems. Initially introduced in November 1992 under the names SPARCworks/TeamWare and ProWorks/TeamWare, it reached the market in 1993. The product was last distributed as part of Forte Developer 6 update 2 but has since been discontinued and is no longer included in the Sun Studio suite.
Within Sun Microsystems, TeamWare represented the primary VCS utilized for overseeing significant source code repositories, including those for Solaris and Java. As these projects adopted an open source approach, their version control migrated to contemporary platforms such as Mercurial.
TeamWare introduced sophisticated capabilities that were not present in earlier VCS tools like RCS and CVS. These features included hierarchical organization of source repositories and atomic updates spanning multiple files—functionalities that later appeared in systems like Subversion and Perforce. The software supports distributed development by allowing copies of repositories to exist on different machines or across networks, enabling developers to perform local commits before synchronizing changes with the central repository on a scheduled basis.
Built as an extension over the older SCCS, TeamWare manages file-level revisions using SCCS but operates without relying on a single centralized server. Users typically interact with repositories through network-mounted filesystems such as NFS.
Evan Adams led the architectural design of TeamWare. The tool smoosh, created by Glenn Skinner for merging SCCS files—and authored by Larry McVoy—is regarded as a foundational predecessor to TeamWare. Concepts from TeamWare influenced McVoy’s later work on the design of the BitKeeper version control system.