Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)
I personally remember that couple of years, 95-97, as ripe for coming up by yourself with things that are now considered &quot;obvious&quot; or just the way things are done. 
Things happened fast: by the start of 1995 the concept of networked computers was a vague thing from the movies to me and by the end of 1997 I was an &quot;experienced&quot; web developer.
We had websites, but we didn&#x27;t have good search, so you still had to learn many things the old hard way.<p>The biggest thing I remember to have &quot;invented&quot; by myself in early 1996 (at the same time as thousands more) was the database driven website: I was tasked with creating a &quot;virtual campus&quot; kind of website with forums, chat, assignments, calendar, grades, news... and the sparse examples and models I had found for all those functionalities used plain text files as storage.<p>After completing a prototype I was obviously sick of dealing with those files and suddenly thought: &quot;hey, dumping all this crap on a few tables in a database would make everything so much easier!&quot;
It felt a bit mind-bending, because you were taught that databases were for internal &quot;databasey&quot; things: Accounting, addresses, customers, widgets and their prices, that kind of stuff. Using a database as storage for a forum or a public-facing website felt almost like a revolutionary concept.<p>By the end of the project I was quite bored of writing plain SQL and I had something very close in spirit to many ORMs&#x2F; the Active Record stuff from Rails. So I sort of &quot;invented&quot; that too.<p>Another thing to reflect on is that I wrote all that as plain C through CGI. The database was mysql. I tried to run it a couple years ago and it compiled and ran almost straight on a modern Linux system, after like 20 minutes fiddling with Apache and the makefile, 20 years after the fact. My current projects seem to rot every time I take a short vacation.