CPAN was also created after 1993, hence it being 20 years old :p I don't know when the Debian package format was first created, but dpkg was rewritten in C bac

CPAN was also created after 1993, hence it being 20 years old :p I don't know when the Debian package format was first created, but dpkg was rewritten in C back in '94[1], so it would predate CPAN. However the real genius of package managers is dependency resolution and the central software repositories - both of which likely came a little while after dpkg. I'd be interested to read more on the history of Debian's package management though - if anyone does find a reference. [1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/plain/main/main.c?id=1b80fb16c22db72457d7a456ffbf1f70a8dfc0a5 https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/plain/main/mai...