I find this hard to parse: link bit rot due to its age, there's some likely tongue-in-cheek references to himself, the layers of people and companies, UO mythol

I find this hard to parse: link bit rot due to its age, there's some likely tongue-in-cheek references to himself, the layers of people and companies, UO mythology... The answer to the question in the title, and at the end, seems to be yes! Google n-gram viewer has the first references to database shard/sharding in 2005, and Ultima Online came out in 1997. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=database+shard%2Cdatabase+sharding&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=database+shard...