Is Ultima Online the origin of the word “shard” in distributed systems?…

As a loan word from Ultima Online, “sharding” makes sense: splitting players across different servers was already a common technique, but UO popularized it, being the first massively popular MMO. And the term “sharding” is unique to UO’s game fict…

[...] Jede Instanz der Applikation ist ein potentielles Spiel (Sharding) [...]

[...] web games end up sharding to cope with the volume of players. By careful game and system design, I think I can build a single [...]

When I started reading about database ‘sharding’, the first thing that came to mind was those days at BarrysWorld and the idea of private MMO ‘shards’ – so, I agree that it is quite likely the term ‘shard’ in this context came from UO…

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Back when I played, it felt as if UO (while enjoyable on its own) was an online game set in a shadow of the true Ultima lineage rather than an integral part of it.

UO had a lot of carefully put together lore that tied to the Ultima series. Then each subsequent team pretty much moved it in different directions because there was not adequate documentation of why things were a given way, etc.

For example — originally the Virtues, in UO’s time period, were not established — they are trying to be established firmly by LB, but he faces political opposition from Blackthorn (despite their friendship). Later teams added things like Virtue Quests which suggested that they were in fact established.

Wasn’t that “The Lost Lands”? What was the thinking in surrounding it in mountains, as opposed to sea?

http://www.usecode.org/ultima/u3/ambrosia.png
http://uo.stratics.com/content/guides/champions/t2aspawn.gif

Lost Lands is a fragment of Ambrosia, just a small portion of the northern end. Minax in both cases was supposed to be near the top.

It would have been *so freaking cool* if Ultima III had been tied into UO as you describe (Ambrosia!!!). Back when I played, it felt as if UO (while enjoyable on its own) was an online game set in a shadow of the true Ultima lineage rather than an integral part of it.