4 ms·

I wrote Finger and developed the supporting database to provide this information in traditional human terms -- real names and places. Because I preferr

I wrote Finger and developed the supporting database to provide this information in traditional human terms -- real names and places. Because I preferred to talk face to face rather than through the computer or telephone, I put in the feature that tells how long the terminal had been idle, so that I could assess the likelihood that I would find them there if I walked down the hall. The program was an instant hit. Some people asked for the Plan file feature so that they could explain their absence or how they could be reached at odd times, so I added it. I found it interesting that this feature evolved into a forum for social commentary and amusing observations. It's amazing that the core features of a modern social network were invented so far back. I wonder what the world would be like today if Unix-like systems had gone more mainstream. Maybe ISPs would include a Unix account on their servers where you could set up your .plan file and things like 'finger' and 'talk' and regular email would fill the space, in a completely distributed and open manner, that Facebook and other social networks currently do.

DanBC 8y ago
This is what your post looks like when you quote text using leading whitespace. https://imgur.com/a/728ty2A https://imgur.com/a/728ty2A
agumonkey 8y ago
the .plan blogging surprised me ... also the ~ being somehow the equivalent of @ :)
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  > also the ~ being somehow the equivalent of @ With the decline of traditional multiuser systems, it might not be common knowledge anymore that e.g. ~joe is an alias for joe's home directory, so prefixing usernames with ~ was already an established pattern. This is still seen in URLs, but is somewhat rare now.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    most often on education websites, teachers having their ~<shortname> page
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Back in the day it was usual for /home/user1/public_html to be exposed as http://server/~user1/ http://server/~user1/ And of course "cd ~", and "cd ~user1" are still everyday commands on pretty much every computer
empath75 8y ago
They were invented repeatedly multiple times. Aol instant messenger is another example.
jlgaddis 8y ago
> Maybe ISPs would include a Unix account on their servers where you could set up your .plan file and things like 'finger' and 'talk' and ... Around 20 years or so ago, many did. At least, the ISPs that I used back then certainly did. It wasn't extremely common but it wasn't all that unusual either.
- kolinko 8y ago
  Yup, I had access to these on my shell that was given to me by my dial-in ISP. I think what killed these services was a potential for abuse and spam. If you have your name/details attached to an e-mail account, it's super easy for marketers to scrap that, and then spam you if you meet certain criteria. Centralised services (with all my distaste towards them) prevent that, because they block spammers, and limit access to such data quite nicely. For a similar reason I think many people stick with gmail - because it's centralised, it can use ML to filter out spam much better than any other mailing services. It's also more secure - the Google's budget on maintaining security of their services is far higher than that of any other provider.
  - mattnewport 8y ago
    I hear this claim a lot (that Gmail's spam filter is so much better than others) but that hasn't been my experience. Spam was not a problem for my corporate email account at my last job that used Exchange and after switching from Gmail to Proton Mail last year (with the same email address on my own domain) I haven't noticed any real difference in the amount of spam than makes it to my inbox. It may have been true that Gmail did a much better job than most other services when it first launched but I don't think it's been true for several years now.
    - hackbinary 8y ago
      MS Exchange on-prem does not include an anti-spam solution. You have to buy one like Symantec security cloud or MS Exchange online security. Exchange is not a 'hosted' solution. Gmail by contrast is only a hosted/cloud solution, and comes with a security solution as part of the service. I can compare Symantec Security Cloud sitting in front of an Exchange solution to a Gmail solution, and say that hands down Gmail is far and away better with exactly zero phishing emails making it through compared to numerous attacks able to get through Symantec Security Cloud to our Exchange users. Comparing Exchange to Gmail is like comparing kwiwis to radishes, in my view.
blakespot 8y ago
You should look into PLATO, as I now am (despite having heard of a fractional form of it due to software offered by TI for my first home computer, the TI-99/4A that I received in 1982). Amazing social network tech, not to mention computer learning which was it's core focus, in the '60s and '70s out of the mid-west. I am reading an excellent book on the history, "The Friendly Orange Glow."
- technofiend 8y ago
  I was extremely lucky to have Plato access in high school. The social and collaborative aspects were amazing. The idea that in 1980 I could send a note to a software author in another state and collaborate with them was (at the time) revolutionary to us high school kids. I don't know any other system that would then allow me to learn to read and write Cyrillic and even if we'd had the right hardware listen to a native speaker.
ajross 8y ago
> It's amazing that the core features of a modern social network were invented so far back. The core feature of a modern social network was invented like 100kya. Doing this stuff on a computer is just a straightforward application. Email is mail. Chat/talk is talk. Finger is a bulletin board. All of those showed up within a few years of serious multiple user systems.
- azinman2 8y ago
  And records, cds, and mp3s are people singing and playing instruments. Netflix is theatre production. Just because something has a history of semantic value to humans doesn’t mean that translating it into new technologies isn’t novel.
  - ajross 8y ago
    Microphones and transducers, laser inteferometric digital storage and perception-based frequency band audio compression are "novel". And by construction here, a big shared communication device that can be used to store bulletin board material is novel. The fact that there are real inventions worth celebrating doesn't mean we should celebrate every obvious use of those inventions.
    - azinman2 8y ago
      Is SMTP and the decentralized nature of email not a real invention? There are a thousand ways to build something like finger, whether centralized/decentralized, what info is disclosed, to whom, privacy models, how it gets updated, what media is included, etc etc. Given it could have been a variant Facebook, much like MySpace could have also been Friendster before it shows how there is a lot of real innovation in things that seem obvious in hindsight. I’d argue there are many, many more “obvious” ways to port existing social conventions to the digital domain that haven’t yet been done.
- mozumder 8y ago
  You just can't impress everyone. "This new protocol allows anyone in the world to transfer information semantically and graphically with anyone else in the world" "Big deal... that's just another form of vocalization that animals have been doing for millions of years!"
lbenes 8y ago
Back when I was a kid, I used to regularly use finger check Carmack's .plan to see what he was up to.[1] Having never given this much thought, if you asked me about the origins of social media, I would have talked about MySpace and Friendster. Now I'd probably begin with talk and finger. [1] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
- MBCook 8y ago
  Carmack is the only reason I even knew what a .plan file was.
- scelerat 8y ago
  If youre giving that talk, don't skip the early web and httpd's commonly-enabled feature to host the contents of people's home directory, a la http://example.com/~username http://example.com/~username.
icedchai 8y ago
You’ve basically described the 90’s Internet.

DanBC 8y ago

This is what your post looks like when you quote text using leading whitespace. https://imgur.com/a/728ty2A https://imgur.com/a/728ty2A

agumonkey 8y ago

the .plan blogging surprised me ... also the ~ being somehow the equivalent of @ :)

0xcde4c3db 8y ago
> also the ~ being somehow the equivalent of @ With the decline of traditional multiuser systems, it might not be common knowledge anymore that e.g. ~joe is an alias for joe's home directory, so prefixing usernames with ~ was already an established pattern. This is still seen in URLs, but is somewhat rare now.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  most often on education websites, teachers having their ~<shortname> page
- isostatic 8y ago
  Back in the day it was usual for /home/user1/public_html to be exposed as http://server/~user1/ http://server/~user1/ And of course "cd ~", and "cd ~user1" are still everyday commands on pretty much every computer

empath75 8y ago

They were invented repeatedly multiple times. Aol instant messenger is another example.

jlgaddis 8y ago

> Maybe ISPs would include a Unix account on their servers where you could set up your .plan file and things like 'finger' and 'talk' and ... Around 20 years or so ago, many did. At least, the ISPs that I used back then certainly did. It wasn't extremely common but it wasn't all that unusual either.

kolinko 8y ago
Yup, I had access to these on my shell that was given to me by my dial-in ISP. I think what killed these services was a potential for abuse and spam. If you have your name/details attached to an e-mail account, it's super easy for marketers to scrap that, and then spam you if you meet certain criteria. Centralised services (with all my distaste towards them) prevent that, because they block spammers, and limit access to such data quite nicely. For a similar reason I think many people stick with gmail - because it's centralised, it can use ML to filter out spam much better than any other mailing services. It's also more secure - the Google's budget on maintaining security of their services is far higher than that of any other provider.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  I hear this claim a lot (that Gmail's spam filter is so much better than others) but that hasn't been my experience. Spam was not a problem for my corporate email account at my last job that used Exchange and after switching from Gmail to Proton Mail last year (with the same email address on my own domain) I haven't noticed any real difference in the amount of spam than makes it to my inbox. It may have been true that Gmail did a much better job than most other services when it first launched but I don't think it's been true for several years now.
  - hackbinary 8y ago
    MS Exchange on-prem does not include an anti-spam solution. You have to buy one like Symantec security cloud or MS Exchange online security. Exchange is not a 'hosted' solution. Gmail by contrast is only a hosted/cloud solution, and comes with a security solution as part of the service. I can compare Symantec Security Cloud sitting in front of an Exchange solution to a Gmail solution, and say that hands down Gmail is far and away better with exactly zero phishing emails making it through compared to numerous attacks able to get through Symantec Security Cloud to our Exchange users. Comparing Exchange to Gmail is like comparing kwiwis to radishes, in my view.

blakespot 8y ago

You should look into PLATO, as I now am (despite having heard of a fractional form of it due to software offered by TI for my first home computer, the TI-99/4A that I received in 1982). Amazing social network tech, not to mention computer learning which was it's core focus, in the '60s and '70s out of the mid-west. I am reading an excellent book on the history, "The Friendly Orange Glow."

technofiend 8y ago
I was extremely lucky to have Plato access in high school. The social and collaborative aspects were amazing. The idea that in 1980 I could send a note to a software author in another state and collaborate with them was (at the time) revolutionary to us high school kids. I don't know any other system that would then allow me to learn to read and write Cyrillic and even if we'd had the right hardware listen to a native speaker.

ajross 8y ago

> It's amazing that the core features of a modern social network were invented so far back. The core feature of a modern social network was invented like 100kya. Doing this stuff on a computer is just a straightforward application. Email is mail. Chat/talk is talk. Finger is a bulletin board. All of those showed up within a few years of serious multiple user systems.

azinman2 8y ago
And records, cds, and mp3s are people singing and playing instruments. Netflix is theatre production. Just because something has a history of semantic value to humans doesn’t mean that translating it into new technologies isn’t novel.
- ajross 8y ago
  Microphones and transducers, laser inteferometric digital storage and perception-based frequency band audio compression are "novel". And by construction here, a big shared communication device that can be used to store bulletin board material is novel. The fact that there are real inventions worth celebrating doesn't mean we should celebrate every obvious use of those inventions.
  - azinman2 8y ago
    Is SMTP and the decentralized nature of email not a real invention? There are a thousand ways to build something like finger, whether centralized/decentralized, what info is disclosed, to whom, privacy models, how it gets updated, what media is included, etc etc. Given it could have been a variant Facebook, much like MySpace could have also been Friendster before it shows how there is a lot of real innovation in things that seem obvious in hindsight. I’d argue there are many, many more “obvious” ways to port existing social conventions to the digital domain that haven’t yet been done.
mozumder 8y ago
You just can't impress everyone. "This new protocol allows anyone in the world to transfer information semantically and graphically with anyone else in the world" "Big deal... that's just another form of vocalization that animals have been doing for millions of years!"

lbenes 8y ago

Back when I was a kid, I used to regularly use finger check Carmack's .plan to see what he was up to.[1] Having never given this much thought, if you asked me about the origins of social media, I would have talked about MySpace and Friendster. Now I'd probably begin with talk and finger. [1] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

MBCook 8y ago
Carmack is the only reason I even knew what a .plan file was.
scelerat 8y ago
If youre giving that talk, don't skip the early web and httpd's commonly-enabled feature to host the contents of people's home directory, a la http://example.com/~username http://example.com/~username.

icedchai 8y ago

You’ve basically described the 90’s Internet.