Also... When we moved from having multiple users per machine to multiple machines per user, services like finger on a specific machine didn't make much sense. It seems you should have one well-advertised machine that maps `foo@example.com` to a `plan.html` file somewhere. (If a user has multiple machines, which one do you query to get their daily .plan?)
Maybe the answer is to define a plan base URL as a DNS TXT resource on a particular DNS domain. For instance, I added the string `< plan https://bi6.us/PL/ >` as a TXT resource at _plan.hamrick.rocks. It should now be a trivial task to write a program called `finger-ng` that when I type `finger-ng meadhbh@hamrick.rocks`, it queries the TXT record at `_plan.hamrick.rocks`, extracts the plan base URL and then retrieves and displays a text document found at `https://bi6.us/PL/meadhbh%40hamrick.rocks`. I guess you could serve up a text/plain, text/html or even image/avif if you wanted to.
This, of course, assumes `bi6.us` is set up to allow me to update that file, but this is also straight-forward. Anyway, check back in a couple days and I'll have some code and I'll write the RFC/ID next week.
In the mid-90s I taught a night class on Unix, and was experimenting with shell scripts from The Unix Programming Environment. There was an example using a loop and the who command to alert you when someone logged onto your local system. My cousin was a professor at a university several states away, and we had already figured out the talk command. So I decided to expand the examples in the book to use finger. By parsing the reply, somehow I could tell if my cousin was logged on, and I would send myself a notice. There was an ISP in the same building, and one day the ISP engineer came to visit me with a stern look. He asked, "By any chance are you sending a finger command every two minutes to this university's mainframe?" I proudly answered, "As a matter of fact, yes, I am!". I eagerly got out my Unix book to show him what I was doing. He just said, "Stop doing that. They have a system console logging program that has churned out dozens of pages of paper printouts because of you". I sheepishly acknowledged my mistake and quit running the script.
Speaking of finger, console logging, and the 90s: when I was a freshman in college I took a Pascal programming course. We were assigned accounts on a cluster of AT&T 3B2 systems running SVR3. The students only had access to a terminal lab; the servers were upstairs, out of our reach.
There was no disc quota or significant restriction on the resources available to us, so I became a video game mogul. I found all the freeware download sites, and I became an expert on portability, tweaking and compiling game software to run on our idiosyncratic system.
As students, we made extensive use of "finger", "w", "who", and "write". We also knew the existence of "wall" and the like. So it was de rigeur for us all to write a little something into our .project and our .plan files. I took it much further, and discovering VT100 escape sequences, produced an animated .plan file which erased and mutated some of the immutable datapoints displayed, such as replacing my $HOME directory with "/" and some script-kiddie flexes like "I have root access... you know!"
Subsequently I explored the system extensively and eventually found /etc/passwd, and for reasons, attempted to "su" to every single account I found in there, most of them being system maintenance accounts. Due to logging and auditing, of course, these blatant, brazen failures captured the attention of the unseen administrator.
I received an email that made my blood run cold. The admin (and I still remember his name 37 years later) told me everything I had done in detail, and said that claiming "root access" was equivalent to telling airport officials that I was carrying a bomb. And there were no academic sanctions or threats in this email, but his veritable omniscience and dead-serious tone made me reconsider many of my life choices at the age of 19. Today, I am thankful for this guy putting things into perspective, that Unix was not just a huge game of Zork or Nethack, and he definitely inspired my career goal as systems admin.
Finger was only part of the social network. The multi-user aspect of Unix itself combined with standard tools such as who, finger, write, mesg, talk, mail, biff, etc. combined to form a fairly complete text-based social network.
Nice to see this here today. A number of hosts the article mentions are on the startpage of lookit, a finger client I've been building: happynetbox, plan.cat, thebackupbox's finger webring, etc.
The start page exists because finger has no discovery layer. finger @host lists users. lookit makes that list selectable, so you can wander a server instead of querying one address at a time.
Perhaps a global database or a parallel project like a search engine focused on fingering is needed. The sources are scattered, and clients like yours would greatly benefit from that.
I used to work at Convex w/ Jay Finger, whose username was "finger". I thought it was funny I could `finger finger` and it would actually do something. This was back when we had multiple users per machine and in the old days if you didn't provide a domain name, the finger command would default to hitting `localhost`.
Also... I seem to remember more than one security issue with stock `fingerd` at the time. After the second or third flaw in fingerd, I think it was banned (as much as it could be) from machines at Convex. By the time I made it to IBM/AIX, it was a serious no-no to have running on your machines.
(1) Looks like great reading. (2) Who compiled the archive, and how? This feels like one of those situations where a person records the evening news onto VHS for decades; except here they were running finger every day for decades? (3) Is there a more mobile-friendly way to browse it?
Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).
Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.
We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!
No, that I think would be Match.com or something along those lines. This is like the grandfather or grand-grandfather of Tinder, but not even intentionally.
What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.
disclose: "AI is one more tool. I use it for mechanical tasks: polishing the wording, catching typos, suggesting synonyms, improving or adapting code blocks and translating the article between Spanish and English."
I write like this sometimes, and I've come to deeply resent the fact that AI slop-machines mimic things that make some writers' style "suspect" or "AI smells".
The slop-machines write the way they do because they have been fed material, and they then spew that back out. So any writer whose style looks a little different, eccentric, or unique may find that the slop-machine's stochastic processes lead them into a state where the pool of possible continuations is small enough that the mimicry is strong.
My wife's writings have recently been labelled as "probably AI" ... and we are livid.
But there's nothing we can do except write in a style that is not truly our own, just to avoid the inaccurate "slop identification" algorithms from smearing us.
Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.
Don't forget head, tail, mount, strip, touch, etc.
My GF when I was first learning these names was convinced the Unix principals did all this quite deliberately and "finger" was her headliner argument. Evidently, even in 1971 someone complained: https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-pinky-command/ (relevant to that source, Usenet/Net News/mailing lists may be another social network which never exactly died and even today LKML, zsh-workers, etc. are main communication avenues).
Also... When we moved from having multiple users per machine to multiple machines per user, services like finger on a specific machine didn't make much sense. It seems you should have one well-advertised machine that maps `foo@example.com` to a `plan.html` file somewhere. (If a user has multiple machines, which one do you query to get their daily .plan?)
Maybe the answer is to define a plan base URL as a DNS TXT resource on a particular DNS domain. For instance, I added the string `< plan https://bi6.us/PL/ >` as a TXT resource at _plan.hamrick.rocks. It should now be a trivial task to write a program called `finger-ng` that when I type `finger-ng meadhbh@hamrick.rocks`, it queries the TXT record at `_plan.hamrick.rocks`, extracts the plan base URL and then retrieves and displays a text document found at `https://bi6.us/PL/meadhbh%40hamrick.rocks`. I guess you could serve up a text/plain, text/html or even image/avif if you wanted to.
This, of course, assumes `bi6.us` is set up to allow me to update that file, but this is also straight-forward. Anyway, check back in a couple days and I'll have some code and I'll write the RFC/ID next week.
In the mid-90s I taught a night class on Unix, and was experimenting with shell scripts from The Unix Programming Environment. There was an example using a loop and the who command to alert you when someone logged onto your local system. My cousin was a professor at a university several states away, and we had already figured out the talk command. So I decided to expand the examples in the book to use finger. By parsing the reply, somehow I could tell if my cousin was logged on, and I would send myself a notice. There was an ISP in the same building, and one day the ISP engineer came to visit me with a stern look. He asked, "By any chance are you sending a finger command every two minutes to this university's mainframe?" I proudly answered, "As a matter of fact, yes, I am!". I eagerly got out my Unix book to show him what I was doing. He just said, "Stop doing that. They have a system console logging program that has churned out dozens of pages of paper printouts because of you". I sheepishly acknowledged my mistake and quit running the script.
Speaking of finger, console logging, and the 90s: when I was a freshman in college I took a Pascal programming course. We were assigned accounts on a cluster of AT&T 3B2 systems running SVR3. The students only had access to a terminal lab; the servers were upstairs, out of our reach.
There was no disc quota or significant restriction on the resources available to us, so I became a video game mogul. I found all the freeware download sites, and I became an expert on portability, tweaking and compiling game software to run on our idiosyncratic system.
As students, we made extensive use of "finger", "w", "who", and "write". We also knew the existence of "wall" and the like. So it was de rigeur for us all to write a little something into our .project and our .plan files. I took it much further, and discovering VT100 escape sequences, produced an animated .plan file which erased and mutated some of the immutable datapoints displayed, such as replacing my $HOME directory with "/" and some script-kiddie flexes like "I have root access... you know!"
Subsequently I explored the system extensively and eventually found /etc/passwd, and for reasons, attempted to "su" to every single account I found in there, most of them being system maintenance accounts. Due to logging and auditing, of course, these blatant, brazen failures captured the attention of the unseen administrator.
I received an email that made my blood run cold. The admin (and I still remember his name 37 years later) told me everything I had done in detail, and said that claiming "root access" was equivalent to telling airport officials that I was carrying a bomb. And there were no academic sanctions or threats in this email, but his veritable omniscience and dead-serious tone made me reconsider many of my life choices at the age of 19. Today, I am thankful for this guy putting things into perspective, that Unix was not just a huge game of Zork or Nethack, and he definitely inspired my career goal as systems admin.
Finger was only part of the social network. The multi-user aspect of Unix itself combined with standard tools such as who, finger, write, mesg, talk, mail, biff, etc. combined to form a fairly complete text-based social network.
Nice to see this here today. A number of hosts the article mentions are on the startpage of lookit, a finger client I've been building: happynetbox, plan.cat, thebackupbox's finger webring, etc.
The start page exists because finger has no discovery layer. finger @host lists users. lookit makes that list selectable, so you can wander a server instead of querying one address at a time.
I just released a v0.2 beta, feedback welcome: https://github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit/releases/tag/v0.2.0...
Great work!
Perhaps a global database or a parallel project like a search engine focused on fingering is needed. The sources are scattered, and clients like yours would greatly benefit from that.
I'd also like to mention that if you have Emacs, I also have my own client: https://git.andros.dev/andros/efinger.el
"The Charted Public Fingerverse" does a pretty good job at this! https://640kb.neocities.org/fingerverse/
Was definitely an inspiration for lookit. And yes, a search engine would be cool!
Wow! Thank you!
A discussion about Finger without a mention of WebFinger[1]? Similar in spirit, but HTTP based.
[1] https://webfinger.net
Related fun site: plan.cat (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248368 )
I used to work at Convex w/ Jay Finger, whose username was "finger". I thought it was funny I could `finger finger` and it would actually do something. This was back when we had multiple users per machine and in the old days if you didn't provide a domain name, the finger command would default to hitting `localhost`.
Also... I seem to remember more than one security issue with stock `fingerd` at the time. After the second or third flaw in fingerd, I think it was banned (as much as it could be) from machines at Convex. By the time I made it to IBM/AIX, it was a serious no-no to have running on your machines.
TFA includes a link to an archive of John Carmack's .plan updates, 1996–2010:
https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/tree/mast...
(1) Looks like great reading. (2) Who compiled the archive, and how? This feels like one of those situations where a person records the evening news onto VHS for decades; except here they were running finger every day for decades? (3) Is there a more mobile-friendly way to browse it?
BluesNews has archives of some more people in gaming from back then.
https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/summary.pl
Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).
Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.
We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!
I'm dying! Using Telnet to flirt. The father of Tinder XD
No, that I think would be Match.com or something along those lines. This is like the grandfather or grand-grandfather of Tinder, but not even intentionally.
What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.
In the late 80s, a friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend via email while they were both sitting in the same computer lab.
There was a fellow student at university who put the entire Hunting Of The Snark in their .plan file. It scrolled for a while.
> No encryption, no headers, no sessions. Pure simplicity.
AI smell?
This is also a very common way to write (hence why LLM tend to regurgitate it so much).
disclose: "AI is one more tool. I use it for mechanical tasks: polishing the wording, catching typos, suggesting synonyms, improving or adapting code blocks and translating the article between Spanish and English."
Those commas do appear to be a load-bearing seam for the sentence — that’s not guaranteed proof, it’s just strong indication.
I write like this sometimes, and I've come to deeply resent the fact that AI slop-machines mimic things that make some writers' style "suspect" or "AI smells".
The slop-machines write the way they do because they have been fed material, and they then spew that back out. So any writer whose style looks a little different, eccentric, or unique may find that the slop-machine's stochastic processes lead them into a state where the pool of possible continuations is small enough that the mimicry is strong.
My wife's writings have recently been labelled as "probably AI" ... and we are livid.
But there's nothing we can do except write in a style that is not truly our own, just to avoid the inaccurate "slop identification" algorithms from smearing us.
Vile machines.
/rant
AI was definitely used in the writing; it’s a pity.
I like it.
Just one cell.
Heck, you could probably make a little program for HN to use the about box as the service and achieve the same thing.
the bare minimum!
Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.
Fantastic! How lovely to read these stories. And what influences Id has had on Finger.
Maybe, an ssh version?
finger is the best-named utility of the Unix world.
Second place is Cat
Don't forget head, tail, mount, strip, touch, etc.
My GF when I was first learning these names was convinced the Unix principals did all this quite deliberately and "finger" was her headliner argument. Evidently, even in 1971 someone complained: https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-pinky-command/ (relevant to that source, Usenet/Net News/mailing lists may be another social network which never exactly died and even today LKML, zsh-workers, etc. are main communication avenues).