I was playing games with "procedural content generation" back in the 80's. Heck I was making computer games that did it. Sigh. One of the joys/annoyances of ignorance and new generations is that everything old is suddenly new again.
Given that the entire website this article lives on is about roguelikes, and the author is also the developer of a roguelike (Unangband), I imagine he is likely aware of the history of randomly generated levels.