I have never heard of [text](url) being used before Markdown. “text (url)” or “text <url>”, leaving the reader to infer which words the URL applied to, sure; but among formats that provided a span for the link text, I think Markdown may have been the first to use a spelling of two adjacent delimited parts. [url text], [text|url], [url="url"]text[/url], et cetera, seen them all.