Jeffrey Prothero (March 15, 1956 – November 16, 2016[citation needed]), also known as Cynbe ru Taren, was a Canadian-born American computer programmer.
He was the author of Citadel, one of the first[citation needed] virtual world systems and also one of the longest-running[citation needed] open source projects; the Digital Anatomist software, better known as the Visible Human Project;[1] the original Pascal strek.pas Star Trek game program; the first Loglan parsers; and Mythryl, a production-grade port of SML/NJ.
In the novel, Cynbe ru Taren is an "Aleriona Intellect Master of the Garden of War, fleet admiral, and military strategist of the Grand Commission of Negotiators.
Beginning in 1998, Prothero and Stone divided their time between Santa Cruz and Tahoe City, California, while maintaining a residence in Austin during school sessions.
He wrote the Skandha visualization system, which assembled microscopic sections of biological material into three-dimensional images which could be manipulated minutely to reveal details of the interior of such objects as the human body.
Its image database was supplied with raw digital material by Wolfgang Rauschning, a Swedish researcher in microtomy and microscopy who specialized in producing ultrathin tissue cross-sections.
To the astonishment of the Digital Anatomist group, they found that the University of Colorado had made a strong bid for the contract using Prothero’s data tapes as examples of its own work.
At first he did not call the program Citadel: instead he named it Ode, after its phone number, the acronym of which was ODE-DATA, later changed to ODD-DATA at the suggestion of friends.
Even at its most early stage, the new social forms enabled by the Citadel system allowed users to display aberrant and antisocial behavior which is now well-known among virtual world researchers, including griefing, unresolvable arguments, and misreadings of innocuous remarks resulting in flame wars.