Today I had occasion to explain the origin of my username, so I decided to blog the answer so I can point others to it in the future.

I've been tbc on the Internet since 1981. Those are my initials. My computer account at university was automatically assigned tbc as the login ID. I've never been convinced of any reason to deviate from this convention. In 1994 AOL started infesting the Internet with hundreds of thousands of induhviduals and other naïve folk who didn't know what they were getting into. Services started springing up, and rules proliferated. I often had to use tbchambers because tbc was too short. Occasionally, tbc was already taken. I'm a computer scientist by training. We always start counting from zero. So I started using tbc0.