Now it can be told ... again!

Back in the dim, dusty, dark ages of my life, along about Summer 1994, my company got access to the Internet via e-mail. It was good timing, since I was seriously burnt-out from a six-month field assignment full of 18-hour days and bitter, hostile clients. I dove in like a drowning man to a swimming pool.

But at the time, I had a problem. Y'see, everyone on the Internet has a sig line. This has faded -- slightly -- at least in the circles I circle. But in those days, it seemed the bigger the sig line the better. Big, elaborate ASCII-art. Multiple boxes with names, addresses, pithy Blake's 7 quotes.

Lots of which was obviously designed around an earlier era of fixed-pitch display fonts.

So Dave needed a sig line. But nothing that would look goofy and ragged on the right when translated into Times Roman.

Ever the imaginative graphics designer, I realized that a fixed, left-margin text border would look cool, and would translate into any font.

So ...

*** Dave Hill
*** dhill@pas01.mycompany.com
*** "Reality takes its toll ...
*** ... please have exact change."

And so it went.

And eventually I was typing "*** Dave" enough that I was using it even in company e-mail (which, in those days, was still a minority of my traffic).

And now you know the rest of the story.

(Note that, properly speaking, there should be a space between the third asterisk and the capital D. In most display cases, though, like on the page title, I leave the space out, since, in those cases, that looks better. Irritatingly enough, though, Google ignores asterisks in its searches.)

(This is a repeat of a post from last October, reprinted here so that I can link to it from the Archives page.)

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