Shrouded in darkness ... lost in the mists of time ... buried inside an enigma within a conundrum ... trapped in the labrynth of history ...
Well, not really. ^z is a somewhat silly signature, but it's all I've got. I started using it about 18 years ago at the ends of email and USENET newsgroup posts, and now I'm stuck with it. People sometimes ask where it came from, but there's not much to tell. I simply made it up; it's short, arguably a virtue; it's somewhat different; it's more-or-less memorable; it has a computerish flavor. My last name begins with "Z", as have virtually all my userids over the years.
Some folks whom I later met in person told me they pronounced ^z as "caret-Zee" (or "carrot-Zee"?!). Others called it "hat-Zee". I prefer to say "control-Zee" (or "control-Zed" at times). To a computer, the symbol ^z represents the ASCII decimal value 26, or in binary 11010. To MS-DOS it's an end-of-file marker; in UNIX it's a request to interrupt a process; for some other operating systems it means "kill" or "quit".
End of mystery ... ^z
2001-08-03
(correlates: AmigaCheck, DiagnosisMortality, NotCare, ...)