Biographies of The Internet Oracle Priesthood

Scott "Stenor" Panzer

Tenure: May 1995-Present

Born and raised on Lawn Guyland, New Yawk, Scott is another member of the apparent minority of Priests without an academic background in computers. Scott has been doing biology in some form or another since 1983, and after doing postdoctoral work in Genetics at Yale, he has moved into bioinformatics and is now a scientist and scientific programmer at Incyte Pharmaceuticals in Palo Alto, CA.

Scott is a relative latecomer to the 'net. Despite early training in computers (he was part of a group attempting to hack the PDP-8 at the high school because the big cool 9th graders thought it was a good idea, and enjoyed patching "Galaxian" for the TRS-80 so that it could be played with a joystick) and early access to email (as a college 'shman in 1984, he had an account he never used because none of his friends had one), Scott didn't make it onto the net until 1991 or so. One fateful day, he realized he could use the account assigned (for DNA sequence crunching purposes) to the lab class he taught for email, and there was no turning back. Soon he had his Very Own unix account on the department Sun 3's, and then on the new Sparcs. He discovered usenet news when the localtalk network in his building was connected to the campus ethernet and news software was distributed. The final nail was hammered into the coffin when he finally could no longer resist checking out the MUD a few of his friends played.

"Stenor", as Scott became known, eventually became a section creator on The Mudde Pathetique, and later learned C and became a coder. With the unfortunate demise of M.P. in June 1994, his interest was captured by the growing World Wide Web, and he became an "arachnerd". Later that summer, he was introduced to the Usenet Oracle and started participating on a semi-regular basis. During the fall, he decided that a web-based Usenet Oracle interface would be fun to implement, and the "Usenet Oracle Resource Index" was born.

Scott currently lives in Sunnyvale, California. He still muds, and is a senior admin and coder on ZeeMud (a spinoff clone of M.P.)22. He also enjoys Perl enough that he will use it in preference to a shell script, even where a shell script would be quicker. (Well, actually, the real reason is that he couldn't write a shell script if his life depended on it). He also likes hiking, 'modern rock' (even though he hates that damn label), complaining about US politics, and cats. He is also a Macintosh Bigot (tm), though one of the few who think Unix is cool too, and is annoyed by the apparently growing similarity between Netscape and various Microsoft products.