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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

"What's the deal with your nickname?"

I was paulsc on Compuserve, back in the late '70s and early '80s, when a 1200 baud modem cost $500, and a BBS login prompt was strangely exciting. In those days, characters counted, and there was already a pauls on Compuserve when I joined.

The interesting bit is that this same six character nic has been usefully available to me in dozens if not hundreds of organizations, "online communities," and online systems ever since. It's really a function of group size and string stemming, I guess. Any group of more than a few hundred is likely to have a user "paul," but to be likely to have a "pauls" the group size needs to be in the tens of thousands, and to get as specific as "paulsc" a group needs to get to several hundred thousand before I show up.

And I'm never _that_ far back in line...