The Internet Oracle is an effort at collective humor in a pseudo-Socratic question-and-answer format. A user sends a question to the Oracle via e-mail, or the Internet Oracle website, and it is sent to another user who may answer it. Meanwhile, the original questioner is also sent a question to answer. All exchanges are conducted through a central distribution system which makes all users anonymous. Unanswered questions are returned to the queue after a day or two. Users may also request unanswered questions without posing their own. A completed question-and-answer pair is called an "Oracularity".
Style
A representative exchange is:
Administration, Digests, and the Priesthood
The Oracularities are compiled into periodic digests by a team of volunteer "priests", who read every Oracularity and select what they consider the best. These are posted to the Usenet newsgrouprec.humor.oracle, the Oracle website, and also distributed via e-mailing list. Now, the forum is basically about asking silly questions to get silly answers; consequently questions meant for libelous intent, questions of a sexual nature, and serious questions are not apt to this forum. An especially adept incarnation may occasionally deal with such questions in keeping with the forum—absurdly, perhaps masking the truth, perhaps framing the truth from an absurd viewpoint, or perhaps resorting to nothing but demanding an absurd tribute.
There is a usenet group, news:rec.humor.oracle.d, which is populated by a variety of participants in the Internet Oracle. The group is rife with TOIJs, obscure references and dry humor. This is probably the only group on multicast e-mail systems of any sort where "OT:..." means on topic.
Origins
is credited with the initial idea for an Oracle program. In 1976, he wrote one which ran at the Harvard Science Center's Unixtime-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 into 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 resided until 2014. It was renamed the Internet Oracle in March 1996. Kinzler has since made further enhancements, the most prominent being the "priests" choosing Oracularities for irregularly published digests. He provides a server to host the Oracle program, its web site, and archives.
Derivatives
The Internet Oracle has spawned a sub-breed of question-answer website exemplified by the Conversatron, and the now defunct Forum 2000, Forum3000 and TrueMeaningOfLife.com, among many others. These share the following characteristics:
Answers are provided not by users, but by an individual or group of individuals.
The group of responders stay largely behind the scenes, attributing responses to various characters or culture references.
Multiple answers are frequently given to each question.
Each answer is accompanied by a picture or icon of the character to which the answer is attributed.
