Checking the stats, I see I've now been on Steemit for a little over 100 days. Wow. As the saying goes: time flies!
In that 100 days, I have met a lot of fine folks, gotten involved in the writing community which meets on Discord†, and even started making a little money—only a buck or two a post on average, but hey, it's a start.
So to mark this occasion, I thought I'd do another part in my Introduce Yourself series. I won't use the tag this time, but we can think of this as a sequel. It's also a bit of writing practice. These days with a more than full-time job, kids, and several side projects, I don't get to do as much writing as I once did.
So let's talk about my username: dbooster. What the heck is a dbooster?
Back to the Past
Way back when, nigh on thirty years ago, the online climate was a bit different than it is today. The internet was around, but few had access to it. Instead we had local BBSs (Bulletin Board System(s)). Someone in the neighborhood would host a BBS on their computer and we would all dial in, connecting over the phone line with our speedy 2400 bps modems (and yes, I do mean bits per second). I always pitied the folks who hadn't upgraded to this cutting-edge speed. They were living in the stone age, the poor fools.
Once we were connected, what was there to do? Well, download stuff. Shareware games like the amazing Wolfenstein 3D. Or leave messages for others to see, which is where the bulletin board in BBS comes from. (For all unfamiliar with the old technology called bulletin boards, they were kind of a proto-internet forum.∆) In practice, most of these messages were ads for local businesses or announcements of things such as D&D‡ events at the local comic book store. It really wasn't much, but we were all enthralled by the idea of being connected to a network, visions of WarGames§ dancing in our heads.
Every BBS was different and if you were lucky, your calling area might be home to several of them. If you were unlucky, you might have to call long distance to connect to a really smoking BBS that made the exuberant long-distance fees worthwhile.
Not all BBSs let you set a username—they were rarely set up to host user accounts, they were more just: connect, view, logoff—but some of the more fancy ones did.
So here we are. I'm a young boy, excited to be surfing the local network, and I am prompted with picking a username. Hmm... what to call myself? If you are familiar with all the Brat Pack films of the 80s¶, you can probably imagine some of the names that came to mind. I considered them all, I assure you. This was serious stuff, after all. I couldn't just pick a username casually! What if I managed to hack into a government database? When they traced the hacker it had to be a really cool name they found, one that would make those FBI agents bow their heads in respect and mutter "Now there is a good username!"
The Comic Connection
Let's flash back several years. A flashback within a flashback—whoa!
Like many boys, I enjoyed comic books. My family was poor growing up, so I never had many, but this just made me enjoy the ones I did manage to acquire even more. I would save my money and go buy one or two a week. To give me something to do, my mom used to pay me 50 cents to walk to the corner supermarket and buy her some supply that she needed.
Only 50 cents, you say? Adjusted for inflation that would be around a buck today. Still not a lot of money, but a not insignificant sum for a young boy. Boy, I had to work for that 50 cents! The store was a good 30-minute walk away and she often requested heavy things.
A pack of baseball cards in those days was 35 cents. I really didn't like baseball much—rather, I liked playing it, but didn't like watching it—but my dad had convinced me that buying baseball cards was something boys have to do, so I did. Plus I liked the gum (which was usually half melted to one of the cards, ruining it; I can imagine this drove early collectors crazy).
A comic, on the other hand, was 75 cents. Superman was 75 cents, anyway. Some other comics were over a buck. Those were for rich boys, I imagined. The Richie Rich type. Lucky bastards.
If I could convince my mom to send me to the store every day, I could buy a pack of baseball cards every day and have 15 cents left over (the local supermarket never charged sales tax on things under a buck) or I could save for two days and buy a Superman comic, having a full quarter left over. Oh the dilemma! Of course, she didn't send me to the store every day.
One day when I went to the store and spun the comic rack, eagerly searching for Superman issues missing from my collection, I stumbled across a new (to me) comic called Booster Gold. What a strange name, I thought. I decided to flip through and, lo and behold, this Booster Gold seemed to operate out of Metropolis and even mentioned Superman. I decided to take the risk and buy it.
Booster Gold
I ended up loving the book. Booster Gold was more of a clown than the serious Superman I was used to, spouting off witty banter as he fought the bad guys, à la Spider-Man. Ah, Spider-Man. I would have loved Spider-Man as a young boy, but unfortunately my local supermarket seemed to be DC comics only. A wicked plot to keep young boys from knowing the House of Ideas, no doubt.
But I digress.
I enjoyed the book so much that the next time I went to the store, I searched for more issues from the series. Much to my distress, there weren't any more. I looked around in a panic! A store clerk must have guessed what I was after and hidden all Booster Gold issues! I could imagine him covertly watching me, laughing to himself, proud of his ploy to prevent me from learning more about Booster Gold.
I ended up buying a pack of baseball cards instead. The sugar from that old baseball pack gum slowly lifted my mood on the walk home and a new idea formed in my head. There must be a comic book store somewhere in this city. I would find it, go there, and buy all the Booster Gold issues within.
I'll spare you the ordeal I went through actually getting to the comic book store after finding it. Let's just jump ahead to the point where I had all the issues of the Booster Gold series, as well as many issues of the Justice League series, which is where Booster Gold moved after his own series was canceled.
Booster Gold was an unoriginal character with a not-so-wholesome past. A not-so-wholesome present, either. He was a university football star in the far future who gambled on games and was kicked out as a result. He then went on to be a security guard at a superhero museum. Deciding that he also wanted to be a hero, he stole several items from the museum as well as a time machine and went back to our time. In our time he acted as a superhero, but money was his ultimate goal, and it was money before being a hero in many cases. If I had discovered him today (difficult, since I no longer read comic books) I wouldn't like him, but something about all of it appealed to my young mind and he quickly became my favorite superhero.
Dbooster is Born
Back to my BBS name. After exhausting all the 80s culture names that came to mind, I turned my thoughts to comics. Booster Gold? No, I didn't want to just copy a name. How about Goldstar, which was an identity Booster's sister took when she also came from the future to the present? (I love how easy time travel is in comics.) While that would have been a cool name, again it was just copying something and I didn't want that. At this point, I was kind of tired of this entire name-picking thing and a little frustrated at my inability to find a really cool name. So more just to get it over with than anything I decided on d for David, my name, and booster, making dbooster. Not quite the cool hacker name I had wanted, but I was tired and it worked, and I decided it was cool enough.
And that, my internet friends, is how dbooster was born. Thirty years later, I'm still using the same username whenever I sign up for anything on the internet. Funny how that worked out.
Footnotes
†: Namely The Writers Block (discord link) and The Isle of Write (discord link). Lots of good folks in both places. If you are a writer of any type or have any writing tendencies, I urge you to check them out.
∆: But David, I hear you cry, bulletin boards are still in common use. Ah, you aren't thinking like a Millennial. (and yes, I am joking, don't send letters. If you know what a letter is.)
‡: Dungeons & Dragons, but only parents who were against the game (common thinking at the time was it led to Satanism) called it that. Everyone else referred to it as D&D.
§: Shall we play a game?
¶: Anyone not a child of the 80s probably only knows of The Breakfast Club. That was a great film, to be sure, but there were many others. Go read about more.
❦
Special thanks to @geke and @geekorner who helped edit this piece. You guys rock!
Just in case you want to go back and learn more about the fella who wrote this, here is my Steemit intro post.
I loved reading about how you picked dbooster for your internet name! My husband will be grateful to you, because I now understand why he wants to keep his childhood comic book collection. He is older than you - he just turned 60. 😊 Also I loved the part about dialing up BBS - when we would use the internet in the early days over our phone line we couldn’t make phone calls!! 😂 We got a second phone line so we could use the internet over that phone line and make phone calls on our original phone line. Pre-cellphone Days!! Crazy how technology has changed everything! I should make a post about being a computer programmer in the 80’s and possibly something about my username choice violetmed. 😃
I would love to hear that story! It's interesting to hear you were a computer programmer. I was a programmer before I gave it up and moved to Japan. Yes, technology sure has changed, hasn't it? I kind of miss the modem sound as it called over the phone line 😅
Haha, yes the modem sound. :)
You're welcome, plus I got to know your secret before anyone else! Except maybe Thunder. 😉
The secret is out!
Thanks for the interesting story. Now I know the origin of Your online name. 30 years is already a long history. I congratulate You with the anniversary - 100 days. I wish You continued success.
Thank you :)
you should've marked the exact date and celebrated the birthday every year 😁
You're right—I should have. A second birthday! ...I should make one up.
hihi
Make it 25 Jan so we'd have a commun birthday soon 😁
Cool, another fan of the Brat Pack era movies. Good post.
Thanks :)
Though you are older than I, and I joined the internet when it already was the internet, I remember having a book on BBSes and gophers and such, and I feel kinship to all that is described here. The early widespread internet still felt like it.
Ah, Golden Booster, what a cad :P
I think BBSes are more remembered that gophers. I wonder how many remember that... I would telnet in and do everything over a dumb terminal with a green flickering screen. Fun times. Early newsgroups were great too.
Great post and backstory. Thanks for sharing. And I love any opportunity to relish in 80s nostalgia.
Thanks for the comment and glad to give you the opportunity :)
Oh, I really enjoy reading such a nostalgic blog. I believe that nobody else in the world knows how internet can change their life dramatically like me. I am a poor countryside Chinese, (till now, I begin to realize Chinese household registration system is just as ingrained as the notorious Indian Caste system.)with the help of internet, (I got access to internet when I was 28 years. Such an amazing feeling. In that small and closed county town, I should be the first batch of people surfing online.) I met my late American husband who was born in New York. Only God knows how deep the gap between the poor place and the most wealthy place in the world is! Yeah, I lived in the Stone age, he lived in the modern age since birth. By means of internet, such kind of different people's souls unexpectedly came together!
He sent me an English name Gina, his surname was Fraser, so my username online is ginafraser.
Our perfect love story ended in a huge tragedy. At that time I couldn't understand how I was so lucky,too. all Chinese envied me to death. They tried their best to ruin me, they threatened my mother to be ill, they kicked me out of my household registration booklet, without it, I had no way to apply for my passport. Without passport, how to get American visa?
According to the rule, There's only one way for poor Chinese in the bottom of society to change their fate and get American visa--English examination system. I never passed my English examination. So after we registered in marriage in China, I didn't play the role of a wife in time, still staying in my hometown. My plan was to continue to learn English in order to get American visa as soon as possible.
Who knows he passed away suddenly and lonely after 15 months when he came to China? At a stroke, all people blamed me, his American family refused to deal with his funeral in China, and his Chinese school also refused, too.
How difficult it is for a poor Chinese in the bottom of society to dream to climb up the class ladder! Even if we have paid the price of death, I'm still a poor countryside Chinese, having no chance to visit to US.
But it is also the power of technology. Without internet technology, I had no chance to meet my late American husband in the next life.
So I am still optimistic about the future! Internet and blockchain technology will change the world step by step.
Our international love story is a pioneer!
I'm sorry to hear about your story. It seems like a very hard life to be born poor in China. But I agree, blockchain technology is going to change everything. Soon enough everyone will have the chance to escape whatever status they are born into. We are living in exciting times! I'm happy I could meet you. :)
very cool post. Thank you sir.
You posted this comment only 2 minutes after I posted the piece. Either you are a very fast reader or you didn't read it. Some advice: leaving fake comments will not gain you any friends, but leave thoughtful comments and people might be motivated to check you out.
This would have made the best post in the steemitnamechallenge by far. Really interesting how the username @dbooster came into being. I see a lot of parallels with my early years in this autobiographical piece. I was a child of the 80's also, but instead of comic books, I was obsessed with 'games workshop' table top war games and painting the lead figures that went with them. Also, I was a massive DnD player and spent all my pocket money on rules books, and forgotten realms campaign books. Magic the gathering cards was another one, ha ha when I think about it, the 80's saw some very clever marketing people get very rich through thier understanding of adolescent boys need to collect things. Great article m8
You are totally a Goldstar! I’d have called you Goldie or even Starry for short! One of my favourite dolls was called Goldie...the memories. ❤️ 😂
But dbooster is still a great choice! ;)