As did cvs. But you are right.

I am not sure, it seems I did misremember. Though it's possible I was actually working with needs-lock files. I can definitely see a certain coworker from that time to put this on all files :/

And even in P4, you could checkout files only at the end, kind of like `git add`. Though this could provide some annoyance if someone had locked the file in the upstream.