GOOD has a funny article today called “The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle.”
Those of us who came of age alongside AOL must contend with something even more incriminating than a lifelong Google profile: A trail of discarded online aliases, each a distillation of how we viewed ourselves and our place in the world at the time of sign-on. The dawn of the Internet was an open invitation to free ourselves from the names our parents gave us and forge self-made identities divorced from our reputations IRL.
True fact. Those were embarrassing times. So… I’ll go first! My original handle, circa like 1994, was AliCat123 (I am what I am). That account is apparently still open (how the fuck do I close a paid AOL account I am not actually paying for?) and recently started spamming my old address book, which has made for some awkward email exchanges.
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.
I think joneser is the silliest online name I’ve used. But it’s also my favorite.
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.
Jesus Christ, did one of you have the internet on vinyl?
@Ben:
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’m gonna go right ahead and admit that I was “Furrydog12.” I got a lot of crazy porn in my inbox at a young age, that’s for sure.
Oh god, I just remembered mine:
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.
“BaybMygnyt” doesn’t seem quite so silly if you’re a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan…
I was BFFR89A on Prodigy, and “Ashen-Shugar” on a BBS over in Vancouver called Foundation Earth.
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.
Oops, I meant K Recs, not Sub Pop of course. Which makes me an even worse person.
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.