I am currently researching for my diploma thesis in computer science with a topic in the area of distributed hash tables. Naturally, I came to the question were the term distributed hash table came from. (I know it is not rocket science to just derive it from distributing a hash table, but somebody somewhere must have come up with it).
Most papers I read referred to the original paper on consistent hashing and one of the first algorithms making use of it (e.g Chord). I know that there was a lot of research on distributed databases in the 80s, so I figure that the term, or maybe the idea behind it, should be older than ~15 years.
The motivation behind this question is that knowing an earlier date and maybe another term for a similar idea would possibly widen the range of useful information I could gather for my research. For example, what have others done that is similar to what I want to do and where have they failed. Etc. etc.
I tried to find more on this subject using Structured Overlay Networks as a search keyword, but the resulting definitions/papers are also quite young, which leaves me with the impression that the research topic might not be so old after all.
Does anybody of you know of earlier research (maybe pre-90s?) in the topics of distributed hash tables and/or structured overlay networks? I'd be glad to hear some keywords which could lead me to more historic papers.