Not so strange. It was way less common to push out software the way we do now. Software releases were generally pretty major events. Leased lines were often slo

Not so strange. It was way less common to push out software the way we do now. Software releases were generally pretty major events. Leased lines were often slow and very expensive. Even into the mid-eighties getting a software distribution or update via magnetic tape was the most common method. Even for software from user groups and other non-commercial sources were distributed on tape. (Source: I did Unix and Tandem programming the early 80s.) So if we look at methods of tape distribution, even the very first edition of Unix in ~1971 had tap (an early ancestor of tar) [1] which saved & restored filenames, mtimes, modes, and owner info. You could argue that a tp/tar archive is a primitive packaging system. [1] http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/tap http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/tap The other instance I can think of is the shar format [2] that was used to distribute software over Usenet from the early 1980s. Shar was basically a fancy text file that you piped through a shell (yeah, I know). Because binary compatibility was rare, most shar files resulted in a directory of source code, which you'd then compile -- basically, like a 'modern' tarball. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar