The answer to: Life, the universe and everything!
What I was told was that is was the number of characters in the above, incuding punctuation but not spaces. I just double checked it and the math works.
Now no clue if this is totally legit, but it\'s what I have been lead to belive for years, like 20 of them. Can\'t for the life of me remember where I heard it. Back then I had just gotten in to the BBS scene and we talked about everything \'geeky\'.