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Some others on this board probably remember too.
Way back in the misty dawn of Internet Time...around 1995, IIRC...most of us grumps hung out at the alt.atheism newsgroup on Usenet. Younger DU'ers will have to Google to learn about the archaic concept of "Usenet." It didn't have pictures or anything.
Sometimes alt.atheism would have hundreds of posters from all over the world.
One day, one of the resident Xian trolls...maybe even the Mighty Bruce himself...threw a tantrum and posted his theory that there COULDN'T really be that many atheists running around loose.
He claimed only 4 or 5 people were doing all the posts, under assumed names. And alt.atheism was....drumroll, please...just another Evil Atheist Conspiracy.
The resident Sorta-Moderator of the group was a wonderful woman with a horrible name--Michelle Malkin.
She immediately offered to assign numbers to each poster, so we could post with our individual number, like "Atheist #XXX," to prove we existed. She also maintained a master list of all the posters, which she would put up from time to time to annoy the trolls.
I don't remember the final count, but I think it was 800 and something. Naturally, the number "666" was highly coveted.
At least as I remember it, right after that the fun posts about "EAC" started going up, complete with all the references you see today--black helicopters etc.
And soon after, somebody created an EAC website with the various logos and bumper stickers for downloading.
That was also the....heh...GENESIS of the "rubber chicken" joke. If you joined the EAC, you got a secret decoder ring, an Anti-Rapture Helmet, and a rubber chicken. Nobody knew why you got a rubber chicken. You just did.
I welcome anybody else with better memories to fill in the gaps...
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