My outlook was conditioned by there being very few Kuhfelds to get confused over.
Yeah, not so easy for me. Years back, i just for fun checked the name statistics for Sweden, and what did i find for my real name? If not including my middle name, my combination first/last name, was the single most common in the nation that year.
The first online name i picked though, still my most commonly used, i really should have been a bit pickier, i just checked on FFN and there's 21 variations using same spelling as me and another 6 using 2nd most common spelling. Surprisingly, none used the same "all caps" version that i used, and sadly, that alone seems to be the one and only thing that stands out the most among the literally hundreds that use the name.
At least Spica75 is very simple yet with some personalisation, Spica, brightest star in the constellation Virgo and 75 my birthyear.
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Even in Hotmail's first six months. Slick was already taken, hence why I got SlickRCBD. The RCBD was a bit of a family thing. I wanted to see if anybody else would recognize me from an old challenge-response code we used when I was growing up during the "stranger danger" scare in the early to mid '80s.
I'd say "RCBD" and if the person was really sent by mom or dad, they would give the correct response. Nobody online has said anything along those lines in 25 years.
Yikes...
Just feeling the potential need for something like that... I mean, i knew the parents/siblings of my friends, everyone my parents knew nearby, the nextdoor neighbors etc, there would never be a need to send anyone out for me that i didn't know.
Not that it was barely ever needed anyway, and the rare few times when it was, well i have elder brothers, they were pretty much the obvious easy choice and if not that, mom would come herself or just call my friend's houses.
Also, i have a feeling that even someone who might have known about it, even if they saw your online name, chances are that unless they know it's you and actually REMEMBER, they probably don't connect it enough to recall.
My brothers interest in DX-ing and radiotelegraphy did cause us to develop and use callsigns though, along with some creativity, like how my friend sat down and using the very simple graphics program on his father's 286(this was mid/late 80s) made a map of the area, printed out one for each of us then simply put numbers on them as a regional code.
Map was totally distorted and utterly imprecise, but since everything was still easily recognisable it worked just fine anyway.
Being able to just barely see each other's house from the top floors was also used with morsecode.
