I bet I know what you are thinking every time you see my user name pop up on your screen. "Oh no, he's going to start droning on and on about Japanese poetry again—need to get away quick." Shame on you for that thought. Poetry is awesome. But your second thought is probably along the lines of "What the heck is a 'dbooster'?!"

Am I right? Of course I am.

Let's then today dive into my username. Origin story time!

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 in labs and some universities, but few had access to it. Instead we had local BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems). Some of you may know what I'm talking about, but that term is probably gibberish to most of you. Here is how they worked: 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 (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, while I was moving close to light speed.

Once we were connected, what was there to do? Well, download stuff. Not so different than today, I suppose. Shareware games like the amazing Wolfenstein 3D or other Apogee masterpieces like the Commander Keen games. In addition, we could leave messages for others to see, which is where the bulletin board in BBS comes from. (I'm sure you all know what a bulletin board is, right?? Analog message board, you Gen-Z whipper snapper.) That makes BBSs kind of like an early version of Reddit. Minus all the porn. 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.

^{Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay}

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. Does the idea of a "long-distance call" that you pay extra for still exist? I'm feeling older by the second.

BBSs didn't have user accounts. At least I never saw any that had them. Such things were way too advanced for that time. But if you left a message you could sign it with any name you wanted. Most people used their full real name, but some used cool callsigns or usernames.

So here we are. I'm a young boy of maybe 12 or 13, excited to be surfing the local network, and I see I can pick 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. As an NES kid, names from all those games also floated through my head. This was serious stuff. 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!"

I had my work set out before me. I was going to find the perfect username.

The Comic Connection

Let's flash back several years. A flashback within a flashback—vibes of Inception here. We have to go deeper!

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 $1.28 today (thank you, inflation calculator). Still not a lot of money, but a not insignificant sum for a young boy. Bro, 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 was a Cubs fan so I was slightly into Baseball, and my dad had convinced me buying baseball cards was something all boys do, so buying those packs seemed like a good idea. 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 dogs. Someday I would join them in their riches, but for now I would have to make due with the cheap stuff.

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! Usually I bought the baseball cards, but I would always look at the comic book rack just to see if anything jumped out at me. On rare occasions there was even a copy of MAD magazine stuck in there. Those were lucky days.

Well, 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 dumb name", I thought. I looked at the cover. "What a dumb costume", I thought. I flipped through and thought "what a dumb sto--" but then before I could finish that thought I noticed something: 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. He would fight the bad guy while spouting off witty banter, 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 and from winning no-prizes from Stan Lee, no doubt.

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. That is, as they say, a story for another time.

Booster Gold was somewhat unique. His personality of a rip-off of Spider-Man, but he was given 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. A hero who was only doing it to make money, basically.

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", an identity Booster's sister took when she also came from the future to the present? (If only time travel was as easy in real life as it is in comics) While that would have been a cool name, again it was just copying something and I didn't want that. I went through several other ideas, but I kept returning to "Booster Gold". Eventually 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.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.