The first attempt at a package management system for Linux was possibly the development of StopAlop by Greg Wettstein at the Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo, North Dakota.

[9][10][11] dpkg was originally created by Ian Murdock in January 1994 as a Shell script.

[16] These include: The dpkg database is located under/var/lib/dpkg; the "status" file contains the list of installed software on the current system.

[17] wpkg was created as a dpkg look-alike that would run under the Microsoft Windows operating system.

[18] It subsequently evolved to include functionality similar to parts of the APT suite, improved repository management, distribution management and was ported to Linux and Unix-like systems, including Cygwin, Mingw32, macOS, OpenSolaris and FreeBSD.