Damn, I forgot about that; I was just lurking back then. Didn’t join and start posting till the following year.
I registered 15 days before my oldest was born. I was bored at work, had been reading the columns for a while and was intrigued by JillGat - the first poster I recognized by name.
Now that baby is heading towards 20 and halfway through her sophomore year in college.
How time does fly.
“Honey, you going to be talking to your mom very long? I wanted to get on the web…”
“To check that Dopey site?”
“Uh, yeah… go ahead and take your time.”
Lurked for ages before I ever registered, longer til I posted. Learned and laughed a lot. Still think that’d be a good antidote to “Hey, I just found this place so I started ten Libertarian threads, and a different Trumpocalypse theory in each forum!”
Nah, that was Joe_Cool. Met him and Jersey Diamond at my first ‘fest in April 2000, I think.
Only during my AOL chat nights. I went by “Snoopy” on the board there. 
I initially went by my real name here and on the erstwhile IMDb boards until a Twoofer over there doxxed me.
That’s nuttin’. I first moderated on a board using two cans and a string.
A 75-baud string.
Shall we all have some yellow cake with pink frosting? Manny people ask me and now I wonder…
My first AOL diskette was for version 2.5
It was 100% B&W.
I’d already been deep into “The Straight Dope” books.
Purely by luck I stumbled upon the AOL Board one day.
And my little brain exploded. 
Dial-Up got verrrrry pricey after that.
Forever in debt to L’il Ed…
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I think I related this before but ---------- During the pay-per-minute days I didn’t do much other than a couple of the Living History boards; I never even looked for the SD although I had the books out at the time. There was one of the newsgroups (wonder what happened to all those?) that purported to be SD-related but even I figured out pretty fast that they were BS. Could have been a real one out there somewhere but I never crossed it.
When monthly subscriptions came along I found “this” through the AOL Community system but ------ I had gotten tagged to be a Host elsewhere and even with a second dedicated phone line there just weren’t enough hours in the day. I posted a few times but ------- not much and with my one AOL address as a name.
Then I found here and lurked quite a bit (years) until someone made the mistake of mentioning something about zombies. Not our kind of reanimated threads but the Saint George shuffling kind. I was big into the various zombie walks and world’s record attempts and that is what got me to register and have something to say. You could probably find who is responsible for “me” but I believe the statute of limitations ran out on that crime in 2014. 
You first-first-half-of-99-oldtimers are so cute.
was that the one with eve? and they started or said something in a thread and ended up banned over it ?
actually, i first read about the dope in a readers digest article that came from somewhere else … then on one of the AOL versions if you put random as a keyword it showed a roulette wheel and took you to random sites and the dope was one of them it kept taking me to and I remembered the article from earlier and since i hated aols message boards and boards, in general, i didn’t join until a year or so after the SD left AOL …because I moved and forgot about ti for a while until i was sent an e-mail about it moving off of AOL
funny thing is I found out ti wasn’t as random as they claimed … it merely took you to one of the 50th low rated places …early click nait if you will
and wow i remember vanilla…she was involved in some 3-way relationship and her trans lover was on here too and vanilla would post these non realistic threads threads on how she was raising her kids and when someone criticized her shed get all butt hurt and her lover would be her attack dog … look up her thread on how she wasn’t going to let her kids even acknowledge Disney even existed because it so mean to stepmothers among other things …
It was more fun to debate back in those days. Even if we did have to put up with John-John.
That was lee. KellyM, of woman-sperm fame, was her lover.
**vanilla ** is the one who got her pastor to register so he could take her side in a dispute.
I still remember your real name, as it showed up in some posts of the “Finish the…” threads, when I’d do a plot summary.
Now here’s something. There was a short time when people could have more than one account.
Nowhere did Tuba object to whoever it was having two accounts. Now I’m wondering when and why the rule was created. But what’s also anachronistic is the guy not wanting to use his known SD handle to post about something personal, or that reflected badly on him, or whatever his reasoning was. There’s been so much oversharing since then, maybe because social media in general has blown up during that time.
(There was a regular at that time by the name of BigIron5. I and a few other posters thought it might have been him, if the name was anything to judge by.)
At one point people would have a regular account and maybe a joke account that everyone knew was them and wasn’t used much. Or, as you indicated, maybe they made a one off account to ask an embarrassing question. Of course, some people had to be assholes and ruin it for everyone else. They’d make fake accounts (sock puppets in the original sense) to make supportive arguments with them in debates and such or to troll. So no more side accounts for anyone.
Wait … what?
I have participated in some “SDMB reminiscing” threads in the recent past.
While pre-social-media online forums may be on the wane, many still exist and are still vibrant – if shrunken – communities.
Joke accounts and badly-kept-secret sock puppets are still a thing.
I remember being quite perplexed about whether UncleBeer and Onkle Biere were or were not the same person.