That’s a nice story, but completely ahistorical; MVC was not originally a distributed architecture but an architecture for local desktop GUI apps. While it was later applied to client/server apps, that isn’t its origin (and even in that context it was never equivalent to the 3-tier model, which you can easily note by all three of M, V, and C being represented by backend components in web frameworks like Rails—the View being the backend component that renders what is sent to the frontend in that version.)