I had a family member working for an AOL call center around that time, the physical token they had was from RSA. At least at the time, it was required for nearly anything, including logging into the customer desktop application.

I didn't use it myself, but I've heard "check in" used colloquially for what seems to be `cvs release`.

All I remember is having to look at each file and figuring out if the diff between 1.13.0.4 and 1.13.0.5 should be applied to 1.16 and then for the next file it was 1.15.1.2 and 1.15.1.4 and so on for each file. That was after AOL had slowed down to the point where you didn’t just release each change but batched they up into releases called QARs (QA Requests where you documented all the changes and stuff to test etc.). So earlier, merging from released point fixes back to the latest version wasn’t common and cvs wasn’t good at it. Later it was more common and what now is a two minute git pull —rebase was a half day.

Also by then, the super genius software folks started getting replaced by MBAs who would rather developers be idle than work on stuff that wasn’t prioritized.