Origins
Peter Langston is credited with the initial idea for an Oracle program. In 1976, he wrote one which ran at the Harvard Science Center's Unix time-sharing system. He then distributed the program via the PSL Games Tape to Unix installations around the world until 1988.
In 1989, Lars Huttar was told about Langston's Oracle by a friend at college. Not knowing where to obtain a copy, he wrote his own version of the program, which only worked when users were logged in to the same computer. Huttar posted the source code to the Usenet group alt.sources in August.
Steve Kinzler, who was a graduate student and system administrator at Indiana University, downloaded Huttar's code that same year. He deployed it as the Usenet Oracle on a university server and it became popular. Ray Moody, a graduate student at Purdue University, enhanced the program to allow access via e-mail. This allowed anyone on the Internet to use the Oracle. Kinzler installed this version on another Indiana University computer, where it became the Internet Oracle in March 1996.
Kinzler has since made further enhancements, the most prominent being the "priests" choosing Oracularities for irregularly published digests. Although he no longer works at Indiana University, the school has continued to provide a server to host the Oracle program, its web site, and archives.
Read more about this topic: Internet Oracle
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