Since 1980 ...
I have two stories about HP packaging, going back to about 1980. The first was a short loop of paper tape used to control form lengths in an HP printer. It was packed in a box about 5 inches square by an inch thick. That box was drowned in packing peanuts in a box the size of a large suitcase.
The second occurred when someone decided to order three pads of COBOL coding forms. We received three reams of forms, in pads. Each shrink-wrapped stack of pads was placed in a box about twice as wide, twice as long, and twice as deep as the stack, with the necessary peanuts. One of the three was then packed in a box that could fit a laundry hamper with plenty of room to spare (peanuted, of course) and the other two "small" boxes were drowned in peanuts in a box the size of a small bathup.
The bathtub-sized box and the laundry-hamper box were left outside the cramped computer room in front of the company comptroller's door. It was there that our computer operator had to go diving in the peanuts to find the contents. It was his first experience with HP packaging, and the comptroller was not amused with the styrofoam sea that clung to the trouser cuffs of everyone who entered, left, or passed his office.
The operator duly sent the shipping paperwork to accounting, who must have done something wrong with it, because the next week another pair of boxes from HP appeared, same contents, same packaging. And the week after that ...
We filled half of a high shelf to the ceiling tiles with COBOL coding forms which, as far as I know, were still there when the company moved about six years later.