Where did the name <*> first begin to appear in literature or code, and did it come with any explanation for the choice of symbol?
It's an ASCIIification of the notation used in the original idioms paper: "Idioms: applicative programming with effects". That notation, was in turn, inspired by an already ASCIIified version from Sweirstra's and Duponcheel's paper on error-correcting parser combinators: "Deterministic, Error-Correcting Combinator Parsers". That came from "Functional Parsers" by Jeroen Fokker. This paper does not indicate where it came from which may mean it originated it. I would not be surprised if it was used for parsing before then.