The original Unix crypt function was, IIRC, salted.
To head off an unproductive discussion, I'll just repeat:
* salts do zero to mitigate brute-force attacks
* even trivial salt schemes break table-based attacks
* the overwhelming majority of passwords are cracked through brute-force, which is attack vector that real-world password hashes need to be evaluated on.
The job of a password hash is to strengthen weak secrets in compromised databases. Your suggestion defines the problem away: "never lose the whole database", it suggests, "and you don't have a problem".
Back then systems used no password at all or stored it in plain text.
In the mid-1970s the NSA just finished DES.
Password shadowing first appeared in UNIX systems with the development of System V Release 3.2 in 1988 - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passwd#History
> "briefly popular in the early 2000s"
Til the dot-com-bubble timeframe many websites stored plain text passwords in databases, later they shifted to SHA1/MD5 hashed passwords without salt.
Only with the Sony hacks a few years ago, many added some kind of salting.