RCS was designed and built by Walter F. Tichy of Purdue University. RCS version 3 was released in 1983.
Adam Hammer, Thomas Narten, and Daniel Trinkle of Purdue supported RCS through version 4.3, released in 1990. Guy Harris of Sun contributed many porting fixes. Paul Eggert of System Development Corporation contributed bug fixes and tuneups. Jay Lepreau contributed 4.3BSD support.
Paul Eggert of Twin Sun wrote the changes for RCS versions 5.5 and 5.6 (1991). Rich Braun of Kronos and Andy Glew of Intel contributed ideas for new options. Bill Hahn of Stratus contributed ideas for setuid support. Ideas for piece tables came from Joe Berkovitz of Stratus and Walter F. Tichy. Matt Cross of Stratus contributed test case ideas. Adam Hammer of Purdue QAed.
Paul Eggert wrote most of the changes for RCS 5.7. K. Richard Pixley of Cygnus Support contributed several bug fixes. Robert Lupton of Princeton and Daniel Trinkle contributed ideas for ‘$Name’ expansion. Brendan Kehoe of Cygnus Support suggested rlog’s -N option. Paul D. Smith of Data General suggested improvements in option and error processing. Adam Hammer of Purdue QAed.
Thien-Thi Nguyen is responsible for RCS 5.8. He modernized the code base, build system, and manual pages, fixing some bugs on the way. He added standard --help, --version processing, and wrote the documentation you are reading (gladly taking inspiration from the paper1 and manpages originally written by Walter F. Tichy).