WHOIS and NICNAME let you look up a name or "handle" for a person
registered in either the Stanford Faculty/Staff/Student database or the
NIC database of registered DDN (Arpanet and Milnet) users.  Examples:

    .whois jones	looks up "jones" in the Stanford database
    .nicname abc	looks us "abc" in the NIC database

It's also possible to look up a host name this way:

    .whois score	looks up "score" in Stanford database
    .nicname sail.stanford.edu    looks up host in NIC database