[wslh]

> Can you please explain a bit more on this.

Yes, sure. The bitcoin innovation was solving the duplicate transaction (or spend) problem in a trustless network. In a private blockchain you have trust between the nodes so this innovation does not apply.

> Also did anything similar to blockchain (distributed decentralized information store) exist earlier?

Yes, databases supported this configuration before and the idea of smart contracts predates Bitcoin. Also, there are a lot of articles before Bitcoin about secure transaction logs.