@nixCraft What do you mean "before cloud repositories"... like before there was the internet at all? The cloud is just a word for "something on the internet", you have to go back quite a ways before repos were hosted on the internet.
In general its GIT now, before that it was SVN, before that it was CVS. Around the CVS time and a little before you had stuff like "Visual source safe" which is likely the only source code repository people really used without the internet getting involved, that was local and i think remote was an option too. Before that we really didnt do versioned repos, it was just plain old files.
@falken Before that we had SCCS and then RCS. These dealt with one file at a time. The innovation with CVS was managing the history of an entire project as a whole.
IMO, GIT is still the sine qua non of version control. (Despite the learning curve.) I did try using some of the competition. The closest competitor IMO was BZR.