Everything Old...
In days of yore, applications ran on a central mainframe. Originally, users would have to physically submit their jobs to the central computer, but eventually terminals were developed that allowed multiple users to interact with the centralized applications simultaneously. In fact, depending on the size and age of your company, you may still have some of these so-called "green screens" in operation today. Terminals provided the benefits of a centralized application, but the user’s interaction with the system was very rigid, consisting primarily of CRUD screens – discrete forms the user would fill out in order to manipulate records. Depending on the application, these records could represent, say, financial transactions, parts orders, or reservations, but the method of interacting with the system was largely the same. "Data Entry" became a job title.
