"Premise" as a location

Solution 1:

I think you're right. If I'm understanding you, the uses you noticed were adjectival, for example, "the premise system started a major fire in the customer's clean room".

In a cursory search (online and the OED), I did not find a precedent for adjectival use of "premises" in the singular, much less use in the singular as a noun to describe a "location or building".

It is of course not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the computer industry has so callowly abused our fine English language.

Solution 2:

The use of "premise" as a nominal adjective (particularly in the computer-related instances you are citing) is based on the need to differentiate between computer and resource locations which are external. While the actual use of the word may not be accurate in the modern understanding of "premise" (or as it is more normally used, "premises", as in relating to the premises of a deed), co-opting words for clarity is quite common in business parlance.

In short, if the computer industry is on board with the use of the phrase, it will quite shortly become linguistic law. Premise can and does refer to locations (albeit normally in plural form), and its use here is due to a lack of a ready alternative.

Solution 3:

Premises plural came to refer to a location because its legal sense of preamble or prologue refers to the introductory paragraphs, or premises, of a deed in which the property deeded (or transferred) by the document is defined and described by its boundaries, landmarks, survey points, etc.