That was the best seller in history, at the time, but there are mechanical computers that played similar tricks going back to the early days of punch cards.
The Hollerith Tabulator won a competition in 1888.
Yes, the technique is obviously predated by Ultima Online. The question we're trying to answer is specifically about the etymology of sharding in the database context.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401
That was the best seller in history, at the time, but there are mechanical computers that played similar tricks going back to the early days of punch cards.
The Hollerith Tabulator won a competition in 1888.
https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/th...
Anyway, yahoo probably sharded by the mid to late 1990s.