that is. not remotely true?

I know for a fact that buying things “on account” (ie having an account with a business and paying the bill you’d racked up at predetermined times) was a common practice during the 19th century, and I feel like I’ve heard that the ancient Romans even had a concept of what we’d now call buying on credit

it absolutely existed earlier in the 20th century, too- the line “buying on credit is so nice” appears in the musical West Side Story, at least in the movie version from 1961

I think credit cards can get out of hand easily, and to some degree the modern system might be called a scam. but the concept of buying on credit did NOT start in 1989

You’re correct that credit in some form has existed essentially since human commerce became a thing. (Not always in the form of a plastic card of course.) I think that what the OP meant is that credit scores (in terms of a nation-wide database) are new. In the US, national credit scores as we know them didn’t arise until the FICO was created in 1989. (Rudimentary forms of credit score databases--which were much less pervasive and only really used by individual banks and creditors--do go back to the 1950′s.) Wide utilization of these credit scores for lending, renting, employment etc., didn’t really start until the late 1990′s and early 2000′s--and yet they’ve been widely accepted as a cornerstone of your economic standing.