I was somewhere in my pre-teens when we first got the internet at the house. My dad had a few terminals with acoustic couplers before that, but the first time I truly remember using the internet was after that screech of the dial-up modem. After opening the browser, dad put me in front of the keyboard and told me to go visit a website, any website. Unable to decide where to go and with that bright, empty, white bar staring me in the face, I typed in my first ever URL: nfl.com. I don’t think I’ve ever visited that site since. If you know me today, you know just how ridiculous that is as I’m not, nor have ever been, a fan of American football.
Several years later, I wouldn’t be caught off guard again when I got my own internet-connected machine, a Pentium 133 that was joined up to the Windows NT domain my dad had for all of the machines in the house. We shared an OC3 (155.52 Mbps!) that he’d had hooked up for his business in the garage. I was awash in bandwidth from day one.
Earlier that year I’d found a small TV in a neighbor’s trash. I’d pulled it apart, figured out how to fix it, and from then on had my own TV in my room. After that, I kept the SciFi network in the background pretty much from when I woke up to when I went to sleep. I was obsessed with Farscape, Sliders, MST3K (which dad and I woudl watch every Saturday together), and Quantum Leap. I’d seen the network’s advertisements for their website and this time around, for the first website on my own machine: scifi.com.
In short order I found their Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server, The Mothership, that had a rudimentary web client. I was once again faced with a blank bar, but this time for a name of my choosing. You would think that I would have learned my lesson the first time, but instead once again, without hesitation, I typed in the first thing that came to mind: Anderson.
Once on the IRC server I found my way to a channel called #bottestlab that had a number of users in it: atlas, foo, janus, shade, and winston to name a few. I may be mixing a few of those up as iterations of the same person, but they were certainly all handles used in the channel at one point or another. This channel would be foundational for all of my interesting in computing, music I enjoyed in my teens, and nerdy sense of humor. Chatting in that channel led me to download mIRC and write some scripts (eggdrops and pokebots) — my first foray into programming. This led to learning C, perl, and python. I would later meet foo in Southern California where he’d give me my first Linux distribution, Slackware, on a set of floppies, but that’s a different story.
I can’t remember who first gave me a hard time for it, but I remember someone in #bottestlab saying that “Anderson” wasn’t much of a handle. As Joey says in Hackers (the cinematic masterpiece): “I need a handle, man. I don’t have an identity until I have a handle.” So I decided to change my name. This time I’d put into the blank bar three letters chosen at random: pfe. They has been the source of many, silly bacronyms since, but from that point forward I was pfe for another 10 or so years.
Growing up in Las Vegas and being a young hacker, I attended DEFCON every year and little by little, as I met people I knew from IRC networks (EFNet, DALnet, The Mothership, and eventually Mystic/Foozone/Xelium) or forums, they would address me by my handle, as was more customary in hacker circles then. Since it was odd to say the letters, many started shortening it to “piff-ee” and that stuck as the pronunciation, spreading as I was introduced to others. As my hobbies expanded and I later met people from bicycle and photography forums, some of which crossed over between groups, the pronunciation of “piff-ee” stuck. Fast forward a few years to university and I spent a short spell as a bicycle messenger where “piffey” was all I was ever called over the radio or at the bar and the name was further cemented across social circles.
Sometime during those years I was doing enough explaining of why it was spelled “pfe”, like I’m doing here now, that I started registering “piffey” on major services. I can’t tell you why I chose that spelling, but I can tell you that now 20 years on I won’t be changing it. Today, my social circles are mixed enough that some know me by my given name and some by piffey — I respond to either the same.
And that’s the origin of the name.
While writing this I did some searching for artifacts from those early days and came across PrincessLeia2’s history of some of those IRC servers and users from a different vantage point. I didn’t spend much time in #deep13, but knew a few users that idled in both.