Nodes have evolved remarkably over Drupal’s history. In Drupal 4.7, node types were typically created by modules that “owned” their node types. There was no way to create a node type without a module behind it. Modules creating node types would implement hook_node_info() and directly handle the the main loading, saving, and editing of the node type. Drupal core handled the loading and saving of the title and body. Modules doing this were effectively subclassing a pseudo-abstract node class (a class containing title and body only) in core and adding their own fields.
