Internet Oracle

Most Oracularities are significantly longer than the above example, and they sometimes take the form of rambling narratives, poems, top-ten lists, spoofing of interactive fiction games, or anything else that can be put into plain text.

A complex Oracle mythos has also evolved around the figure of an omniscient, anthropomorphic, geeky deity and a host of grovelling priests and attendants.

These include the worthless High Priest Zadoc (sometimes with an assistant named Kendai), the Oracle's girlfriend Lisa the Net.Sex.Goddess, an assortment of deities, and the caveman figure Og.

Not knowing where to obtain a copy, he wrote his own version of the program, which only worked when users were logged into the same computer.

Steve Kinzler, who was a graduate student and system administrator at Indiana University, downloaded Huttar's code that same year.

Ray Moody, a graduate student at Purdue University, enhanced the program to allow access via e-mail.

Kinzler has since made further enhancements, the most prominent being the "priests" choosing Oracularities for irregularly published digests.