I'd argue that I was able to do the exact same thing 20 years ago using VMWare Workstation - download a VHD image with OS and app(s) pre-installed and configured, optionally map to a drive on the host OS and get started instantly...
Maybe I'm too old to get the appeal of "a fleet of containers" in place of a single (and potentially throw-away) VM image along with maybe even a vagrant-script to make it easily reproducible... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯