Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-4139960-20130210170026/@comment-188432-20130211173846

Wow. I almost don't have the temerity to investigate this one. What I can say with reasonable certainty without research is that the term emerged only under JNT. I'm almost positive that it was never called "console room" until Castrovalva, when Five tells Adric that the unravelled scarf should get him back to "the console room". (And then Bidmead has everyone say that phrase. I'm pretty positive the room was never mentioned more times than in Castrovalva.)  Certainly, in Masque of Mandragora, it's quite firmly the "second control room". I guess it's time to fire up the Acrobat search bar.

My hunch at this point, though, is that unfortunately this probably means that later authors would have gone with console room, just because Castrovalva is one of those "seminal" episodes that a lot of 1990s writers would have seen and well remembered. I'll let ya know what the research turns up.