Unexpectedly, I made the de-facto distribution tar files for source code releases of the Perl programming language for a year or two in the early 1990s. Up until sometime in the Perl 4 release cycle, its author Larry Wall distributed Perl by posting a set of several dozen shar (shell archive) files on the Usenet group comp.sources.unix or comp.sources.misc, so people using dialup modems could download them without having to restart if the phone disconnected. In between major releases, he posted patches which were much smaller than a full distribution.
I was volunteering for the GNU project, which distributed Perl as a courtesy since it was popular free software that used the GNU license. The GNU FTP site prep.ai.mit.edu distributed source code in compressed tar files, so each time Larry released a new Perl version, I downloaded the shars and created a single tar file which I uploaded to prep. Dozens of organizations mirrored the GNU FTP server and did their own redistribution, so it was amusing to notice that most of the Perl 3 tar files out there had my user name in them if you did a tar -tvf to list them. They seem to have fallen off the Internet by now, as the last Perl 4 release is the oldest version that’s easy to find.
I finally stopped when Larry started making tar files of Perl releases himself. Larry last posted Perl 4 patch shars to comp.sources.misc in June 1992. I don’t remember whether he started making tar files concurrently, or only after he stopped posting the shars.
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