The term comes from Ultima Online, one of the first graphical MMORPGs that gained mass-market acceptance. The rationale behind the architecture that Origin used for geographical load balancing was that the independent copy of the game world that resided on each server represented a "shard" of the shattered gem of Mondain the Wizard.
Well yes I knew that. But the point is that people had been distributing their load over a set of identical resources for decades before that, usually calling it "Partitioning" or some other word that wasn't "Shard". This is an often repeated patter in the field unfortunately : new people invent something that they don't realize already existed and make up a new name.
