4 ms·

Keeping an archive of .plan files and making it web accessible is why Ryan wrote IcculusFinger. A shame finger died out :-)

by feld 10y ago

erlehmann_ 10y ago
GNU coreutils contains pinky(1), a lightweight finger(1) replacement.
eriknstr 10y ago
At one university where I studied at for a bit around the period of 2009 - 2012, they had and, judging from their Wiki, still do have, finger daemons running on most Linux servers and workstation -- perhaps even on all of them. Furthermore, the vast majority of workstation computers at the department for informatics and at the department of mathematics are running RHEL, so it's not just a handful of computers. As for how many were actually making active use of finger and in particular .plan files, that was probably just a handful of people. I was one such person for a while after having learned about it and thinking it was kind of neat, but I eventually gave up on maintaining my .plan file and focused on other ways to share things.
ucs 10y ago
A shame finger died out :-) To be fair, it never had much of a life to begin with. I bet I can count on one finger (sorry) the number of folks who ever saw the cute ASCII art in my .plan. Carmack may well have been the only person in history to have put finger to good use. Even back in those days, using your .plan for actual status updates was virtually unheard-of.
LeoPanthera 10y ago
You can finger my email address (david [at] gloveraoki [dot] net) to read my Twitter. For no real reason other than I thought it was fun.
digi_owl 10y ago
Finger is one of those ideas that worked only while the internet was a playground for the university labs. After all, it requires that a port is exposed to the world for someone to read it.
- ucs 10y ago
  Much like email, finger was a service usually hosted by your ISP/university/workplace. The daemon did not run on your own machine.
- bananaboy 10y ago
  Yeah when I was at university (1998 - 2002) .plans were used by a lot of students as a primitive blogging mechanism. I also wrote some perl scripts to show .plans on the web, and even added some basic markup features. I bet a lot of people did that as their first experiments in cgi programming!
- tinus_hn 10y ago
  The problem with finger is that it exposes information that is now considered sensitive while it provides very little benefit. And of course because it is an old protocol there were some security issues with the daemon. It's a neat idea but if you want to share information about yourself, why not have a webpage?

Keeping an archive of .plan files and making it web accessible is why Ryan wrote IcculusFinger. A shame finger died out :-)

by feld 10y ago

Keeping an archive of .plan files and making it web accessible is why Ryan wrote IcculusFinger. A shame finger died out :-)

erlehmann_ 10y ago

GNU coreutils contains pinky(1), a lightweight finger(1) replacement.

eriknstr 10y ago

At one university where I studied at for a bit around the period of 2009 - 2012, they had and, judging from their Wiki, still do have, finger daemons running on most Linux servers and workstation -- perhaps even on all of them. Furthermore, the vast majority of workstation computers at the department for informatics and at the department of mathematics are running RHEL, so it's not just a handful of computers. As for how many were actually making active use of finger and in particular .plan files, that was probably just a handful of people. I was one such person for a while after having learned about it and thinking it was kind of neat, but I eventually gave up on maintaining my .plan file and focused on other ways to share things.

ucs 10y ago

A shame finger died out :-) To be fair, it never had much of a life to begin with. I bet I can count on one finger (sorry) the number of folks who ever saw the cute ASCII art in my .plan. Carmack may well have been the only person in history to have put finger to good use. Even back in those days, using your .plan for actual status updates was virtually unheard-of.

LeoPanthera 10y ago

You can finger my email address (david [at] gloveraoki [dot] net) to read my Twitter. For no real reason other than I thought it was fun.

digi_owl 10y ago

Finger is one of those ideas that worked only while the internet was a playground for the university labs. After all, it requires that a port is exposed to the world for someone to read it.

ucs 10y ago
Much like email, finger was a service usually hosted by your ISP/university/workplace. The daemon did not run on your own machine.
bananaboy 10y ago
Yeah when I was at university (1998 - 2002) .plans were used by a lot of students as a primitive blogging mechanism. I also wrote some perl scripts to show .plans on the web, and even added some basic markup features. I bet a lot of people did that as their first experiments in cgi programming!
tinus_hn 10y ago
The problem with finger is that it exposes information that is now considered sensitive while it provides very little benefit. And of course because it is an old protocol there were some security issues with the daemon. It's a neat idea but if you want to share information about yourself, why not have a webpage?