The best explanation is probably the one by Casey Muratori (https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001). He devised the technique and conied the term in 2002.
Can't imagine he was the first person to use this technique. I'd assume any game written from the point where it was reasonable to continually redraw the screen instead of using incremental repainting would've used such a technique, because it's simply the easiest way to implement random ad-hoc GUIs if you don't have a widget toolkit underneath you (and possibly even if you do).
Probably. I was using a similar technique in the late 80s in turbo pascal. Casey has the merit to have given it a name and make a video about it.