Perhaps I should have been more specific - I was referring to something akin to Ultrix's setld or IRIX's inst, a user-friendly utility to view/install/upgrade OS components as well as applications.

Ultrix setld first appeared in 2.0, which was 1987.  As far as I can tell, IRIX inst appeared at about the same time.  A quick look through some manuals shows that SunOS 3 (same timeframe) appears to have had a user-friendly initial setup program but it's not clear to me if it could be used after an installation to deinstall/modify/upgrade/etc.  I know almost nothing about early HPUX, AIX, Domain/OS, etc. and hopefully some folks who used them might be able to chime in.

And yes, setld is pretty bad.  I remember it being painfully slow on real hardware, and it's still somewhat slow on emulated hardware.

-Henry

On 24 January 2017 at 12:06, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
Hmmm - I suspect is depends on what you call package & installation management.  My guess is that all of the UNIX systems had something that were made from people that were birthed on DEC systems.   Certainly, Masscomp's RTU had something very much like VMS's scheme - why because the same person designed/influenced/implemented both of them (Tom Kent).    My guess is that SunOS, Apollo/Domain et al were similar - as at least they knew the importance of same.

The problem I have with the question is that the managers we have today are much different than the managers we had then.   Even things as simple as BSD's pkg_add is different from RPM much less yum, apt or brew compared to the (shutter) setld (DEC's my least favorite).

Clem 

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 11:27 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
The recent discussion of Solaris made me think - what was the first Unix to have centralized package management as part of the OS?  I know that IRIX had it, I think from the beginning (possibly even for the GL2 releases) but I imagine there was probably something before that.

-Henry