Create a new, empty repository.

A repository is the official place where you store all your work.  It keeps track of your tree, by which I mean all your files, as well as the layout of the directories in which they are stored.

But there has to be more.  If the definition in the previous paragraph were the whole story, then a version control repository would be no more than a network filesystem.  A repository is much more than that.  A repository contains history.

    repository = filesystem * time

A filesystem is two-dimensional:  Its space is defined by directories and files.  In contrast, a repository is three-dimensional:  It exists in a continuum defined by directories, files, and time.  A version control repository contains every version of your source code that has ever existed. 

A consequence of this idea is that nothing is ever really destroyed.  Every time you make some kind of change to your repository, even if that change is to delete something, the repository gets larger because the history is longer. Each change adds to the history of the repository.  We never subtract anything from that history.

The create operation is used to create a new repository. This is one of the first operations you will use, and after that, it gets used a lot less often.

When you create a new repository, your VCS will expect you to say something to identify it, such as where you want it to be created, or what its name should be.