I use the title because it's what the piece of paper my university gave me when I graduated says. "Programming" is a portion of my job, alongside reviewing other people's work, design, and sitting around in meetings with people who don't have technical knowledge. Any mechanical, electrical, civil, etc, engineer will have a similar experience in many cases, except replace "programming" with something related to their area

Perhaps a button for people with enough votes to automatically generate an archive link?

Maybe you are talking about Ultima Online, because the original Ultima games predate Time Bandits. Also, Marvel multiverse would have been mostly influenced by DC Comics alternate Earths, with Earth-2 introduced in 1961.

Hmmm... I vaguely recall the term "shards" when referring to DB/2 running on S36, S38, and later newfangled AS/400 across the world. When presenting the data in a single pane, some "shards" would come in late, or be broken, and require reconnecting.

I played Renaissance and the following one on unofficial servers for about 6 years between 2003 and 2010. My offline and online friends would easily play 6-8 hours per day, and when we were offline we were talking about it. It was like a second life and an incredible escape, but looking back at it we were all addicted to it pretty badly. I get flashbacks and cravings to this day.

Ultima Online in the age of dialup and early DSL was a history-altering game for MMO's. I still log on to UO Forever servers every once in a while (a modified game server with accelerated skill learning) to level up a character and scrabble together enough gold to build and furnish a house. It was such a vast game and the sheet depth of it for a game of that time was unprecedented. I still think to this day it is one of the best "just go do what you want to do" MMOs out there, something that New World didn't even get right 20 years after with considerably more resources and advances behind it.

Runescape is the only other game from that era (and which shares a lot of gameplay similarities) that has that much staying power.