The thing you must always remember is that not everything of significance in the history of PerlMonks was actually captured within the content on the site itself; PerlMonks was essentially a demonstration of the Everything Engine (one of many), so we're really talking about "What was Ryan dem bones Postma's involvement in Everything?" It seems that he was much more about content — writing, quality control, etc. — than programming; I'm not even sure he was a Perl guy at all. See The E2 Backstory (which, you'll note, was posted by clampe — another central Everything figure who, like dem bones, has left no artifacts here other than a user profile.) For an interesting little insight into dem bones' importance in E2, see The Node Code, which shows that only he and nate held vroom-like status there!

Of the current monks, perhaps only chromatic actually knew him.

Right; afaict, chromatic is the only one of the original monks still active. :-(

Update: - if "Last here: (27 weeks ago)" qualifies as "still active" :-( :-(