Comment by tengwar2

I understand what you are saying, but that's not close to the original meaning of the term, or at least not what I have seen in early papers. Originally the idea was a single central repository of information which would be used to run a company: so similar to systems like SAP, but obviously a lot simpler and with the assumption of running on a mainframe. It didn't refer to a particular choice of data structure, but to the way that multiple business processes would share information.