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By the year 1998 I was using the term "shard" in slides for MySQL, and I believe mSQL as well. The term might be found in Slashdot's source code. I am pretty sure I gave a talk on sharding at the open database summit in 2001.

I had previously used the term shard for an app I wrote and distributed for VMS around '92, but that app only ever had a handful of users. It was available via FTP.

FWIW I took the term from the movie "The Dark Crystal".

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I agree that the movie, released in 1982, is likely the source for the term sharding used by games, consciously realized or not. Most of the generation would have seen it. Or perhaps from where Henson and Froud likely got the idea of a crystal shard containing a complete copy of the whole, holography, which I think got into the public consciousness in the 70s and 80s.

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