My very first online community with persistant logins was back in 1992 on Prodigy. In those olden days we weren't even allowed to create handles, it was all random-ish strings of characters and numbers.
God I can't believe anyone can even remember those. I was dialing in to local BBSs as far back as 1992 or so, probably, but I don't think there's any way I can remember those old BBS/AOL/Compuserve handles.
That's not to say I won't ruin my day trying, however. Definitely a great idea for an article.
As with CC and Graham, I too was on BBS/Prodigy/etc back in the late 80's early 90's. There was a BBS that my sister and I always dialed into in Yakima that had usernames. I can't remember what mine was, but I'm pretty sure hers was TGINXSFAN.
When AOL first came out and had screen names (I tried it because it meant free 5 1/4" floppy discs!) , I remember mine being "Nebraska" because I was obsessed with Springsteen at the time.
Actually,yes! I didn't have any of the records though. There is a better article on this with more popular examples, but this gives you an idea at least:
I'm such a fucking dork that I actually used to run a BBS named after a SubPop band (Some Velvet Sidewalk), off and on for about two years. Those were good times, actually.
When I was 15, I loved swing music (who can blame anyone that saw Swing Kids as a teen? Fighting Nazis with dance? Gold.). My first handle? Swinggirl15. Yeah.
Oh fuck me. This is great. And I have no recollection at all of what mine was. I recall dialing into BBS to play Legend of the Red Dragon. But can't for the life of me remember the handle.
@FC: You played L.O.R.D.? That game was buggy as hell and had hilarious exploits. If I remember correctly, it allowed you to sell negative amounts of stuff and it would just give you money. So cheat-a-rific.
@Graham. Yes! Cheating was definitely a part of the art of the game. Mostly it was just excellent to break into the rooms of classmates and murder them.
That's not to say I won't ruin my day trying, however. Definitely a great idea for an article.
When AOL first came out and had screen names (I tried it because it meant free 5 1/4" floppy discs!) , I remember mine being "Nebraska" because I was obsessed with Springsteen at the time.
Actually,yes! I didn't have any of the records though. There is a better article on this with more popular examples, but this gives you an idea at least:
http://vinylfanatics.com/index.php/article…
I was 11. It was 1992. My handle on the local bbs's was always Kurdt.
As in Cobain, the way he spelled it on Bleach.