I would not be surprised if the patent office itself used this method for filing patent information in various DBs.
In fact, before the growth of the internet, Identifying and Requesting Data in Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data would sound almost exactly like a long winded academic description of finding a book through the public library inter-lending network.
One file system that comes to mind using the approach described in the patent is Venti though: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs240/readings/venti-fast.pdf