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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

When I was growing up in the 90s and early 00s anonymity online was the whole point. Everything online was behind usernames, and usernames weren't expected to be connected to your real identity at all.

You consider that the norm because that's what you grew up with.

Before then, people would sign everything on the internet (and its predecessor networks) with their real names, work/home addresses, phone numbers, and more.

That's why when you create a new user on a *nix box, it asks for that information.

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Sure, that is the timeframe I grew up with so there is bias there. It also happens to be when the internet was starting be used more broadly.

Correct me if I'm wrong here because it is before my time, but prior to WWW wasn't the common use for the internet government and academic research, and technical communications of those actually building the internet protocols? Unless I'm wrong there, I just wouldn't really lump that in when comparing how the average person uses the internet.

Mainly academic and military and spouses and family, yes.

FWiW shitposting on UseNet started very early on - binary porn coming from German airbases was a thing and while many official things were sent from @MyRealName there were plenty of handles used and an0n postings.

Inside the US, we all were given historical precedents for anonymous speech. While the Declaration of Independence was signed, most of the leaflets arguing for independence were anonymous.

Or, consider Publius as the author of the Federalist papers, a pseudonym for Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay.

It's what the internet grew up with, actually.

> That's why when you create a new user on a *nix box, it asks for that information.

That's your local account, not information that is visible to anyone outside of your network.

>That's your local account, not information that is visible to anyone outside of your network.

There are a lot of unix tools to ask networks to query that information and they'll happily do it for other unix systems they connect to. When I was in college in the last 90s, I'd often lookup phone numbers and such of students at other universities using command line unix utilities.

Like what? I'm not familiar with any daemons that expose this info on a network interface. Maybe identd? AFAIK that can expose the username, none of the other fields, but is typically set to an alternate identifier.

Or do you mean shared mainframes with many users on the same system? That'd still be local to the system, you just happened to have access to that system.

Are you sure you're not just thinking of ldap/directory lookups?

Finger is one that was commonly available on university unix systems. You could do finger username@node.domain, and the username was often their email address or some common shortening of their name.

.. and when Usenet appeared people commented in tech newsgroups with their realnames and a good number of them also posted in alt newsgroups under nom de guerres.

That was the early 1980s as I recall them.

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