It came from Java, believe it or not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_2
It seems to me that, in that original design, the JSP servlet acting as a Controller was a multi-use object that would serve many requests?
To me, one of the weirdest things about Rails-style MVC is that a controller is reinstantiated for every request and then promptly thrown away. I'm used to thinking of controllers in desktop apps as rarely-destroyed objects which do a lot of communication with each other.
The Rails-style controller could just be called "RequestHandler" or something like that, IMO.
Jaw, meet floor.
This was seen as a terrible practice, whose sole benefit was to allow lazy programmers to have state variables in their controllers, and was promptly deprecated. Only to have Rails and other similar frameworks basically pick it up!