Patterns and especially design patterns have been around for a long time.
In software “design patterns” became a household term when “The Gang of Four” (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralf Johnson and John Vlissides) published their book “Design Patterns – Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” more than 10 years ago. This book not only lay the foundation for a set of design patterns in software, but it also described how to best define and describe these patterns.
But, patterns have been around for much longer than since 1995! Since the beginning of software there have been books about how to best solve a given problem.