Let's start with a little history. On 8 January 2009, the first release of Bitcoin was announced by Satoshi Nakamoto (satoshi @ vistomail . com. The Windows-only version of the code was provided as a rar file which is still available at sourceforge. You had to unpack the files and run BITCOIN.EXE and it would automatically connect to other nodes.
Thank you for writing this post. It made my understanding of Bitcoin better. Please do keep writing.