Refactoring always existed. We just didn't have a name for it and it was done by us meat popsicles.

The first known use of the term "refactoring" in the published literature was in a September, 1990 article by William Opdyke and Ralph Johnson - "Refactoring: An Aid in Designing Application Frameworks and Evolving Object-Oriented Systems". Proceedings of the Symposium on Object Oriented Programming Emphasizing Practical Applications (SOOPPA). ACM.