Long before a CMS meant a website, it meant a filing cabinet you could not lift.

FileNet shipped document imaging systems in the mid eighties. The problem was banks and insurers drowning in paper: a claim file that existed in one physical folder, in one building, that one person could hold at a time. Scanning it solved storage. It did not solve the interesting part, which was that a document has a life. Someone drafts it, someone approves it, it supersedes an earlier version, it becomes legally required to keep for seven years and then legally required to destroy.

That is the ancestry worth knowing, because every idea people argue about in web CMSes today was already argued about there.

Versioning came first. If a document is amended, is the amended thing the same document or a new one? Both answers are defensible and they lead to different databases. Records management said the old version is the real one and the new version is an event that happened to it. Publishing said the current version is the document and history is a courtesy.

Then workflow. A document that needs three signatures is not a file, it is a small state machine, and the software has to know which state it is in and who can move it. Documentum built a business on this in the early nineties and it is still the reason enterprise content software feels the way it does.

Then metadata, which was the fight nobody won. A scanned invoice is useless unless you can find it, and finding it means somebody typed the vendor name, the date and the amount into fields beside the scan. The content is the scan. The fields are what makes it retrievable. Every argument about front matter, taxonomies and structured fields is that same argument with better tooling.

What the web did not inherit was the seriousness. When these systems lost a document there were consequences with lawyers attached, so they were built by people who assumed failure. Web CMSes were built by people who assumed a page could be republished.

I think that difference explains a lot. It explains why a WordPress install will happily let you overwrite a post with no record of what was there before, and why nobody considers that a scandal. It also explains why the moment a CMS is used for anything with money or law attached, somebody bolts a revision system onto it and discovers the bolt does not fit.

The next one is about when the phrase itself turned up, which is later than you would guess and attached to software that had nothing to do with publishing pages.