

Background of .plan files: the 1977 Finger Protocol - jpadvo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

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morganpyne
I feel like such an oldie reading things like this :-) Watching the younger
generations rediscover things that I have lived through is making me gravely
aware of my own mortality today. I'm expecting somebody to point out an
article on Kermit next, or be astonished that once upon a time some people
used email from a VAX vt100 terminal to access the public ftp server on
nic.funet.fi :D

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clarkm
While I've never seen anyone use .plan or .project files, the finger command
is still widely used on MIT's network. In fact, MIT's user search
(<http://web.mit.edu/search.html>) is just a front-end for the finger command.

It does raise some privacy concerns though, as you can see here:
<http://amap.mit.edu/>

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waffle_ss
Also, there was something called "Faces" or "Picons" which were kind of a
precursor to Gravatar which showed you images that corresponded to emails,
domains, and more. Indiana University had a Web service for performing these
lookups using finger[0] (looks like it has since been turned off). For
example, here is Richard Stallman[1] and here is Dennis Ritchie (RIP)[2].

[0]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172305/http://www.cs.indi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172305/http://www.cs.indiana.edu:800/finger/gateway)

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172449/http://www.cs.indi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172449/http://www.cs.indiana.edu:800/finger/gnu.ai.mit.edu/rms/w)

[2]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172341/http://www.cs.indi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172341/http://www.cs.indiana.edu:800/finger/research.att.com/dmr/w)

~~~
ars
See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face>

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jpadvo
I posted this after being really inspired by the HN post about John Carmack's
.plan file[1], and then doing some research to discover what exactly a .plan
file is.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3367230>

~~~
pyre
news.ycombinator. _org_ ?

~~~
jpadvo
That is what I get in Chrome when I tab to autocomplete "n". At some point I
must have typed in "news.ycombinator.org" out of curiosity, and Chrome decided
to favor it.

