I am glad someone has posted a topic on this because that’s the issue I pondered recently. I am thinking about people I know or used to know in the past and coming to the conclusion that to the best of my knowledge, I never consciously met another person on the spectrum. Like everybody else I happened to meet folks who exhibited eccentricities of some sort but unlike many people from WP who (in all honesty, I can say that they are doing it just by force) look for fellow spectrumites wherever they can see something out of the norm, I would never be tempted to describe them as having AS/PDD-NOS.
As far as I am able to judge, those who showed traits that are common among ASers, first and foremost had perfect social skills so I think these were just gifted. The others were not aspies but simply wimps, not too smart in addition, as I can suspect - my great aunt and her two sons one of whom died in 1997 are/were like that; about those sons I happened to hear once that they attended a special school of some sort so I don’t know what it could be about – slight mental retardation? (that’s the case of the great aunt herself, I guess) – learning disabilities? No idea.
In my grade in elementary school there was that boy in the same class who as I know now, showed the traits but I am almost sure these were just traits, well, maybe he might have PDD-NOS, that’s highly possible but not full blown AS (until he hid more extreme traits and even then his hypothetical AS would be mild). In that time I thought he was simply very shy, he came from a family which could be called pathological in some respects, I don’t know the details on how his family life looked like but his parents were a couple of drunkards (I don’t know to what extent they abused alcohol), about his mom I heard a story that, intoxicated, she once tried to jump out of the window thinking she was Batman.
Once on holidays I met a preteen boy (he told me his father his mother divorced was an alcohol abuser as well) who didn’t get social clues too well and was generally disliked because of it – he didn’t understand that people didn’t want to have him following their every step. It was striking to me. He didn’t seem to understand either that some things shouldn’t be told – he had no problems to tell us that he repeated a grade. He could have PDD-NOS, I don’t know, but maybe the real reason of his small differences was that he was immature and not too smart? He wasn’t a genius, that’s for sure.
I also once had a student who was smart and very socially awkward but I think it was just that – he was smart and very shy. That’s already all the people under suspicion I can remember. Although on the other hand, for me, as I’m I guess, a moderate case in comparison to many people from here who seem normal, just relatively eccentric and socially awkward for me, until I was a witness of some really very out of the norm behaviors, I would not be able to recognize a spectrumite, assuming some people are just weird and not autistic in any manner.