> the episode of buffy the vampire slayer where the demon gets uploaded into the internet through a scanner

one thing i found interesting about this clusterfuck of a half-tech literate plot is when buffy starts asking the computer science/AV nerds how to trace an email to its source

and they didn't know about email metadata(fair but unlikely, given it's the early days when such data was more accessible, since they were supposed to be highscshool students) but their answer was the interesting part to me: that "you check their profile" -- makes me wonder if in 1996 email providers (like AOL) *did* have profiles that you could check, making mail/usenet groups acting more like the social media of today than I perhaps would have thought possible at the time.

after all how do you check someone's "email profile"?? Was there some kind of finger-like tool to do this originally?? even on the early proprietary email pre-hotmail platforms?

( also i'm guessing #buffyverse is the tag for this stuff? )