I'm pretty sure <> as glob has been around since pretty close to the beginning of time as far as perl is concerned. It was present in Perl 4.
A quick look in the git log of the perl5 repository shows commentary about it from Jun 1988 in perl 2.0
In reply to Re^4: Perl <dir_with_wildcards>
by duff
in thread Perl <dir_with_wildcards>
by haroyken
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