Sit back and get cozy, kiddies, itās Story Time.
Waaaaay back in the days before the World Wide Web as we know it today existed, there were Usenet newsgroups. (Well, technically, I suppose there still are Usenet newsgroups. But I digress.) These were essentially distributed online discussion forumsāinstead of going to a single site (because websites didnāt exist back then, remember?) where everything was kept, you connected to your local server, and text posts were distributed from the originating server out to all the other servers.
(I remember having to use uuencode to convert image files into text, then breaking the large text file into smaller chunks so each part could be posted to a newsgroup (because each post could only be so long, yāsee?). Someone who wanted to view the orignal image would then have to get each chunk, string them all together into a single text file, and run uudecode to get the image file. Good times, good timesā¦not. But I digress.)
Anyway, there was one newsgroup (think of it as a subforum) that I read that was best described as interactive fictionāno flashy avatars, no graphics at all, just text. Some threads were serious discussion threads, others were fluffier, but everything was written in the third person, and most people participated as themselves (no goofy online personae).
The thing is, there were already a lot of guys there named Bill.
(Among other things, we would tell stories about how four of us created a barbershop quartet called the Past Due Bills. But I digress.)
To differentiate myself from all the other Bills, I originally referred to myself as āBill (no, not Jonesā¦no, not Smithā¦no, not Andrewsā¦no, that other one)ā. Over time, this naturally shortened itself to āBill (no, that other one)ā.
A few years later, this chat service called IRC became popular, and the folks in my little Usenet newsgroup set up an IRC channel on one of the quieter networks. The thing is, IRC nicknames could only be ten characters longā¦and "Bill (no, " would be a stupid nickname.
Thus, āOtherBillā was born.
These days, I take a simpler view. OtherBill is that liāl pixelated on-screen avatar that pew-pews at enemies and dodges shotguns. Meanwhile, Bill is the putz at the keyboard typing all of this for you to read.