I guess that once ftp sites and Usenet binary groups had de facto standardized on tar files (first compressed, later gzipped; uuencoded for Usenet), it was a fo

I guess that once ftp sites and Usenet binary groups had de facto standardized on tar files (first compressed, later gzipped; uuencoded for Usenet), it was a foregone conclusion. Why they did, I don't know; it may have been random. Originally, lots of source was distributed as a shar file (also possibly compressed and uuencoded); maybe the name similarity with tar helped?