I’m easy to find, even though I’m not on Facebook (helped somewhat by having a unique name, though). However, almost none of my friends from High School (let alone Primary School) are easy to find if you don’t count Facebook. It’s very surprising for some of them who were very much into computers in the 80s, I would’ve expected them to have a high profile online too.
Are we allowed to use real names if we have nothing but nice things to say about them?
If so…
While in college (1987 - 1991) I co-op’ed at a place called COMSAT in Clarksburg, Maryland. I worked in a lab where we designed and developed microwave feedhorns for earth terminal communication antennas.
One of the engineers there was named Earl Carpenter. He was one of the most incredible engineers I have ever met. Very skilled in mathematics. He was the primary “brains” in our group. I would say he was in his late 40s / early 50s when I worked there.
Every now and then I search for him via google. I haven’t found a single thing. It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth. 
When I graduated high school there were 10 of us in the senior class in band. We’ve all pretty much stayed in touch (via Facebook) except one guy who was pretty ubiquitous in the group and quite well-liked.
I posted a pic of him one “Throwback Thursday” and sparked a long thread about him, with people wondering where he was and sharing memories of him. Some people had seen him in the past 20 years around town. No one knew for sure where he worked or what his family status was. People started asking me about him “offline” like “Did you find him yet?” and stuff.
A couple weeks later one of my fellow grads called and said “My dad just ran in to Jason in the middle of the street!” Turns out her dad lived diagonally from Jason’s mom and didn’t know. Jason had just had surgery to remove a brain tumor and was staying at his mom’s house to recuperate.
So the fellow grad and I met at her dad’s house and walked over to the guy’s mom’s house and knocked. He answered, he spoke to us and was very nice. We were happy to hear that he was going to make a full recovery from his surgery. He loved his job and had a very nice support group in his co-workers (it seemed). He asked about us. He said we should keep in touch. I gave him a paper with my contact info on it. Hugs and goodbye.
It’s been a few months and no one has heard from him since. Although a couple of people have seen him around town. I don’t think he really wants to get back together with the rest of us, which is fine. I am glad to know he is alive and doing well. That’s all we needed. He can let us know if he wants “back in” any time!
I’ve got a couple of headscratchers, including one long-lost relative that I know was online back in the 80s and 90s and completely computer savvy - absolutely no online presence whatsoever. This guy enjoyed working on computers, one of the first people I knew with an email address, he works in a technology-related field. WTF. Get a Facebook, man!
Another old friend of mine has a name that is so exceedingly common (something along the lines of James Anderson) that I’ve never been able to find him online either, although I know he must be, since that’s where I met him originally. What’s worse, I had no luck tracking him down by finding his family members because THEY all have exceedingly common first names as well.
So, not participating in Social Media is the opposite of internet-savvy?:dubious: Maybe ol’ Rog is simply not interested in that sort of thing. I agree it does seem weird when, in this age of everybody’s bidness being online, that one can’t at least locate someone.
What I find strange is my inability to find out the status of someone who is in jail for 3 counts of murder. Isn’t that supposed to be public information?
Did you try Linkedin, I am seeing lots of CPA’s named Roger Phillips from Bunghole Wa.
I can ask some of the people I know who worked at COMSAT, I know one guy who I see every couple of weeks. My father used to work there as well, but he was in a different place around that time I believe. If you want to PM me and send me a couple of other names I can see if anyone remembers/knows of him.
There was, for a long time, an ex who I just couldn’t find. She had an uncommon first and last name combination. When I dated her I figured she would go on to get her Ph. D. When I finally found her it was through her sister who happens to be a TV anchor and I had to ask what happened to her. Turns out she got married and changed her last name, something she said she wasn’t going to do. Found her on Facebook pretty easy after that.
There’s another ex that I still haven’t found. An Irish woman with a really rare last name. Don’t know if she changed her last name, something she said she wasn’t going to do either, the only person I can find with her name is a 90 year old woman in New York, pretty sure they’re not the same.
Do not make my bunghole angry.
Who had an on-line presence pre-1992? I’m not even sure that was a concept back then. People might have had Compuserve or Q-Link accounts or a Usenet presence, but they’d have been in the minority. I’m not sure what year it was you could have taken it for granted that someone outside of academia or industry had an email address, but in 1992, you couldn’t even assume that someone had a home PC and a modem. (Dammit…after writing that paragraph, I feel old – I remember writing my thesis ~25 years ago on a Powerbook with a 9 inch black and white screen and feeling like I was surfing on the crest of technology.)
Anyway, one of my advisors who was quite well known in his field has dropped off the internet radar. I’d say it was surprising, but I’ve done kind of the same thing. Left academia, stopped publishing, don’t really care if people know what I had for dinner last night, so I don’t do twitter or Facebook. So casual Google searches aren’t going to reveal much beyond the very fact of my existence.
I posted a thread not long ago about how I tried to find some old girlfriends online.
One I found after my divorce; I was misspelling her name. We met, fell in love, and are currently living together.
One I found just this past year. She’d been murdered in 1986, and it took this long for court and police records to be uploaded and catch up with my search skills…
It’s not unheard of…
Googling myself, name only, usually reveals a British pediatrician and a young woman in Utah.
Googling one of my e-mail usernames took me to a porn site similar to the one mentioned above. 
The “Others” box is for messages from people who are not on your friends list, or in some cases even your friends-of-friends list.
I found out recently that you can block friend requests to FofF only.
Once in a while, people may use their middle names IRL. This can make finding someone challenging too.
However, as with my doctor acquaintance, it’s been long enough, and he’s old enough, that it’s possible that he died not long afterwards.
In the fall of 1993, I took a class where the professor held up a shiny silver circle and asked us, “What is this?” We all replied, “Duh, a CD!” and she replied, “No, it’s a CD-ROM. It’s going to take over for floppy discs.” She also asked us how many of us had heard of the Internet; most of us had raised our hands, and it was during the Bernardo-Homolka murder trial, which probably raised awareness of the Internet more than any other single factor.
As for online presence, I found out his fate by Googling him and the city where we were living at the time, and found a web page from his high school about an upcoming reunion, and who in the class had died. I confirmed the date by going to familysearch.org.
I remember being about 10 years old, and saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a machine you could go to somewhere that had all the information in the world in it?” We have it now, sort of, and I’m sitting at one right now!" 
I maintain a very sparse real-name presence on the intertubes. For fun, I just did a Google-image-search to see what got referenced. Somehow, the top hits for my name come up with pictures of an old-timey threadworn teddy bear, a badger, and a photo of Liv Tyler. I shudder to imagine the meta-tagging in Google’s database that is tying that to my (seemingly) completely unrelated name.
One of my college friends is on facebook and is friends with our mutual friends, but has his FB security down so tight I can’t even see him on their friends list so I can friend request him. So sometimes people ARE there but hidden. And that’s not including people who blocked you on purpose.
I can’t find my junior high and high school best friends. One’s female, so maybe she changed her name. The other goes by his nickname, but is not there either by it or legal name. I think they’re both alive. I would have heard if the HS friend passed and I saw the woman’s mother once with a little baby (assuming it’s her grandkid by my friend). It makes me sad.
My high school class has a facebook group, which is fairly nice, but I’ve gone to many different schools so I wish sometimes there were pages for them too. My junior high page was … weird. It was a junior high and elementary school for 100 years, so there were tons of people and no one I knew.
I was part of the reunion committee for my year in 1989. That was funnnn! We did manage to track down about 98% of our year and kept the details, making later reunions easier to organise.
Many are still not findable on the 'net.
Yes. This very attractive guy that I had the biggest crush on all through school - he has an unusual name, and I have a lot of friends that he was friends with, but mine of us know what happened to him.
Did I mention that I’ve been trying, on and off, for 19 years, to find any sign of this guy online?
But, yeah, I understand people not going for Facebook/social media. I just tried to find my immediate boss on Facebook, and … she’s 31 years old, 18 years younger than me, and yet she has no Facebook presence. I know her first and last name, and searched accordingly, even including our company name and the name of our home town. I ended up on the Facebook page of a 9-year-old girl who happens to share my boss’s name, and lives across the river from me. Not what I was looking for.