[chaosharmonic]

I mean, I'm more than willing to take the reductive approach and just say that the purpose of a system is what it does.

But if we assume that it wasn't designed maliciously, we can look at this through another lens: FICO already existed at the time, so banks in particular would simply have no reason to bother calling around to all of your former creditors in the first place.

They would also probably need a third party agency just to find your former creditors.