Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's guide to using the Internet in 1994

1994, internet What the internet was like in 1994, according to Midjourney

Behold the EFF's (Extended) Guide to the Internet, which dates to 1994—the year I got online for the first time. (via)

There are .sigs and there are .sigs. Many people put only bare-bones information in their .sig files — their names and e-mail addresses, perhaps their phone numbers. Others add a quotation they think is funny or profound and a disclaimer that their views are not those of their employer. Still others add some ASCII-art graphics. And then there are those who go totally berserk, posting huge creations with multiple quotes, hideous ASCII "barfics" and more e-mail addresses than anybody could humanly need. College freshmen unleashed on the Net seem to excel at these. You can see the best of the worst in the alt.fan.warlord newsgroup, which exists solely to critique .sigs that go too far, such as:

Perhaps an explanation of those extra letters after the dots is in order, too.

Previously: The Dead Media Manifesto