Internet Oracle

The Internet Oracle, formerly known as The Usenet Oracle, is a collaborative effort at collective humor in a pseudo-socratic question and answer format.

A petitioner asks question to the Oracle via email, and in short order the answer arrives, also by email. As "payment", the petitioner must answer a question sent to him from the question queue.

A representative (and famous) exchange is:

 The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
 Your question was:

   > Why is a cow?

 And in response, thus spake the oracle:

   } Mu.

Many of the oracularities contain Zen references and witty wordplay.

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

The "Oracularities" are compiled into periodic digests by a team of volunteer "priests," who cull the responses and select what they consider the best.

The Oracle was started in the mid 1980's by Steve Kinzler, as an indirect descendant of an older game program written by Peter Langston in 1975-1976 at the Harvard Science Center.