# Background: History

For the last 20 years, many different flavours of Smalltalk have used Monticello as a simple but powerful distributed version control system. 

In the past decade, newer distributing versioning systems such as Git and Mercurial have become extremely popular and, although Monticello still has lots of fans and is very functional, there is an increasing view in the community that we should leverage the convenience of these more widely known systems. 

While there are several tools that already allow Smalltalk code to be committed into such code repositories (most frequently: git), none of them has yet reached the maturity to replace Monticello. Iceberg was born as a project to bring these ideas together and fix this for Pharo!