A Short History on Handles

In my early days on the internet (mid-late 1990s), I don’t recall joining any large social sites. I think the biggest social networks I could fathom were GeoCities and Yahoo! Games, where I created some rudimentary html pages and played hearts, respectively.

This post “Who Am I (Online)?” was mostly inspired by xkcd 2363 Message Boards, wherein a daughter finds her mom via an old message board and posts on her twenty-year-old thread. So here are some breadcrumbs for the future.

My First Username

zeus_ruler_1

Prevailing wisdom(?) circa late 1990s was to create a memorable username without identifying information. I want to say this was in 1997/1998 (7th grade?), at which time, according to the Pew, the internet already had ~150 million users.

I was taking a mythology course in middle school and decided to use Zeus as a moniker. I landed on a combination of “Zeus is ruler number 1” because so many other combinations were already taken. I used this moniker well into high school on a variety of sites but primarily Yahoo! Games and as an email address (zeus_ruler_1@yahoo.com).

Out of curiosity, I tried to perform a password reset at Yahoo, and it seems that at some point I had a jump.net email address I have no recollection of.

yahoo login

Yahoo, Not Hotmail or AOL?

I think that for a lot of people, RoadRunner (which later became Time Warner Cable and is now Spectrum) was their first email address; that or possibly Hotmail or AOL. I speculate that during this time, my first email provider was either Hotmail or Roadrunner. I tried password recovering to no avail. I would guess I used “jrowe@austin.rr.com,” but who knows. I definitely remember getting the AOL CDs in the mail.

AIM/AOL Messenger

For AOL Instant Messenger, I remember trying to find something with my name in it and settling on “jamesthe3000th” out of frustration at how many combinations of “James” were already taken. I used this handle for a number of years into college.

I also used MSN Messenger and ICQ, but I don’t remember what my handles were.

Battle.net/Blizzard

In high school and college, I spent time playing Diablo and World of Warcraft on Battle.net. I tried to see what emails I had registered, but again no luck. For many of my character names on these online RPGs, I signed up as “sirsparhawk” after the knight Sparhawk in the David Eddings books. No points granted for my character class of choice.

Joining Gmail

My first Gmail account was my full name. I didn’t get in during the beta, but would have signed up in the 2005-2008 timeframe. This was the first time I remember people using their full names when signing up for a service. But that could be confabulation. I’ve deleted several Gmail accounts along the way because of various different frustrations with data privacy and just a general desire to try other services, but at this point, I’m back to Gmail.

Somehow, evidence of this still exists in my GitHub settings.

github user emails

RIT Assigned ID

In college, I was assigned the user ID “jsr6720,” and this moniker has stuck with me in some form to date. I’ve had to adjust the prefix to satisfy some sites’ username restrictions, but I would guess most combinations are me. Not quite the bellow of “2-4-6-0-1”, but it’s mine.

My First Online Blog

https://txcowboycoder.wordpress.com

At my first job, I kept finding interesting things I wanted to share and published them on my now user/password locked txcowboycoder site. I had created a Gravatar as well. No clue what happened to all these logins over time.

It looks like I had also registered the domain codedeputy.com for some short period of time—likely with Bluehost or 1and1 hosting? I would find out later that “Cowboy Coding” was considered a derogatory software development practice, and I felt like the domain codedeputy.com read as “Coded Eputy.” Oh well, it would be practice for the future.

gravatar txcowboycoder

I tried to extend this online “brand” to contribute on Stack Overflow, but I only submitted a few answers before a bad experience turned me away.1

stackoverflow txcowboycoder

Significant Revisions

  • Jan 18th, 2025 Promoted from _archive to _posts folder.
  • Jan 10th, 2025 Decided to dust this off and edit it.
  • May 21st, 2024 Originally published on https://www.jsrowe.com with uid E13E92A6-8DE8-466E-9FE3-D1A8BA02909E Immediately filed in _archive as it was fun to reminisce, but nothing I want to publish. But also all mostly public information.

Footnotes

  1. I have since found out that I’m not alone in this experience https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23575451&cid=65078395 ↩