Up till when the web took off, when people would post to the internet they would include a signature, or tag, line at the end of their posts as a form of disclaimer - so readers understood the posters were speaking in an official capacity for their employers. It was standard form to try to be clever and original.

I started out with "My employers don't tell me what to say, and I don't tell them where to stick it."

Later I changed to "My employers disagree with everything I say, write, think, believe, feel, do, or plan to do."

They often included contact information as well. Eventually, they changed to only saying clever (and sometimes no-so clever) things and including contact info - little or no attempt at disclaimer.

The general etiquette was to try to keep them in 5 lines, as bandwidth - even along backbones - was restricted, but mostly because rates of character transmission were so low, it was *very* painful to have to download these things sometimes. Five long lines at 300 baud and no compression is excruciating. Also, this was back when a person might only have a few megabytes in a personal account ... and who wants to waste space with nonessential stuff when they save messages?

I read them the first few times and then I don't even see them any more - my brain usually just filters 'em out.

k