Which makes sense, in a way. Most (all?) of the popular version control systems back then were centralized, and required the central server to even make a commit. Even Subversion, a "better CVS", required this. When you have to wait several seconds (or more) to make a commit, and you couldn't edit things to tidy up history after the fact, you tended to make commits much less often.

I kinda take git for granted now, where commits happen in a fraction of a second. Sometimes it's hard to remember what a pain it was using CVS, and even SVN.