The name wasn't invented until 2003, but yes.

Guestbooks, contact forms, signup pages, and the like started receiving automated abuse approximately five minutes after they were invented. It didn't take long after that for people to start including a question they expected to be easy for a person and hard to automate with a script.

What's relatively new is CAPTCHAs merely to browse a site. There are few faster ways to get me to close your site, and maybe send you an unfriendly email.