na Prescott was anap@sco.com, which was originally an acronym for "automated network administration program". At SCO you could request some change (like adding yourself to an alias) by emailing the request to "anap" and when it was done, you'd get an automated reply from "anap" at some late hour, like midnight.

Since login names at SCO are almost all first-name-last-initial, there was occasional confusion when the program was first written. It sent automated mail to people, and they'd think they were getting letters from someone named Ana P.

There came a day when, for the sake of the muse, I needed to create a fictional SCO employee to post to an internal newsgroup and complain about a stolen aquarium. In a brainstorming session with my fellow pranksters, someone (Tim Ruckle, I think, though it may have been Jon) suggested using the anap account to post the message; I liked the idea, and suggested the surname Prescott, in honor of a city in Arizona I liked visiting as a kid.

From that day to this, anap mail has always had a human name attached to it. (Several years ago, Ana got married to her London-office counterpart Ana Pringle, and now Ana Prescott-Pringle handles all the company email administration worldwide.)

i think is was robert (rAsTrO?!) boucher who did most of the programming for anap initially and i'm pretty sure it was tim that encouraged the reference evan mentioned and in specific, the fiery redhead on a harley imagery for her. i think he also implied she always turned down his advances. i just did what i could to keep things running and expand the legend. :}

And now you know the rest of the story.

-thanks to Bill, Evan, and Jon.