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.
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!
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).
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...
Related fun site: plan.cat (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248368 )
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!
There was a fellow student at university who put the entire Hunting Of The Snark in their .plan file. It scrolled for a while.
I'm dying! Using Telnet to flirt. The father of Tinder XD
> No encryption, no headers, no sessions. Pure simplicity.
AI smell?
I don't know about this one, but considering this recent post on the same blog < https://en.andros.dev/blog/c8838a2b/implementing-clean-archi...> the author does seem to significantly AI-generate at least some of their posts.
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.
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!
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).