Henry Spencer got his BSc at the University of Saskatchewan and his MSc at the University of Toronto. He worked as a UNIX systems programmer at the University of Toronto for a number of years before becoming an independent consultant and author. Henry ran the first Usenet site in Canada (and the first outside the US), which was part of the Usenet "backbone" in its early days. He and Geoff Collyer wrote C News, one of the two major software packages for network news transport and storage. Henry worked on a first draft of the replacement for RFC 1036, which defines the format and protocols of network news. He was involved in the early definition of CANet (the Canadian national research network) and was primary speaker at the Workshop On NetNews of the RNP (Brazil's National Research Network) in Rio de Janeiro in August 1992, as a United Nations technical consultant. Henry is also a founding member and past board member of the Canadian Space Society, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, and an occasional consultant to the Canadian Space Agency. He was head of mission planning for the now-dormant Canadian Solar Sail Project.