Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, weren’t university logins tied to real identities for many decades?

For some reason the myth that in the old days of the internet people used "handles" or nicknames and not real identities crops up here all the time. I can only assume people making the claim weren't on the internet in the 20th century and/or were on AOL.

On the Facebook of the 1990s, Usenet, people routinely posted with their real name/identity and real email address, and message headers showed each server the post passed through from its origin, the IP address of the poster (which could and did result in doxxing) and often an "abuse@ISP" email address to complain about the post/poster.

True, but that was for convenience, not because we thought we needed to have a "real identity". (IP addresses were later, ISPs were much later, but yes, UUCP hops were recorded. FWIW, my UUCP paths ended in something close to my legal name.)

Remember some of early Usenet, I wouldn't be surprised if some people had taken advantage of Californian naming laws (at the time, one could use almost any name one wanted, as long as it was consistent and not intended for fraud) to make their legal name more consistent with their online handle.

Mark V. Shaney is an example of a user who was not using their real name/identity (nor even had one).

Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thequux can tell us how pseudonymous usernames were in his time?

    Quaxity quuxity,
    Teitelman's InterLISP
    Has a DWIM feature that's
    Really a screw;
    MacLISP has evident
    Superiority,
    Letting its customer
    Mean what he do.

As a teenager at the time it was impressed on us how important it was to not use our real name on the internet. I didn't use my real name for anything on the internet for at least 10 years after I started using it.

My university login was a pseudonym. Sure, you could have tried to get my real name from the admins, but it would have taken at least some effort.

Moreover, online forums (remember phpBB?) were overwhelmingly pseudonymous on practice.

Pretty sure you could have done:

    finger rwj@cxa.dl.ac.uk

and found out who I was all the way through to the mid 90s.

University logins were handles (usually close to "real", but not tied) in my time. I firmly believe the whole real identity thing has always been driven by advertising considerations.

(Our undergrad computing lab had donated CAD workstations, so someone came up with a graphical display of the room, showing who was logged in where. The TA was displeased with me after figuring out that I had set my avatar to the "unoccupied" graphic. IIRC, he added a square outline for logged-in workstations to the display, around the same time.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com