
Origins of the finger command (1990) - ColinWright
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/IdFAN6HPw3k/Ci5BfN8i26AJ
======
Mister_Snuggles

        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.

~~~
jlgaddis
> _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
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.

~~~
ColinWright
> _... gmail - because it 's centralised, it can use ML to filter out spam
> much better than any other mailing services._

For me, GMail is worse than useless as a spam filter. I don't know if I have
especially unusual email or what, but there's so much ends up in the spam bin
I need to wade through it all anyway, so it _costs_ me time.

At least, it did. I've given up on it.

~~~
ColinWright
I'm baffled - I have no idea why this would be downvoted. I know that 88k
karma and $5 will buy me a $5 coffee, and to that extent karma is completely
irrelevant, but it says that somehow, to someone in the HN community, this
comment is of negative value.

As I've said elsewhere[0], as an engineer at heart, a model-maker and problem
solver, it's like sandpaper on the brain when people act in ways that mystify
me, and for which I have no effective, working model.

Baffled.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007328)

~~~
avar
I usually don't comment on these sorts of comments, but since you're a very
active user I'l bite.

I downvoted you because this type of commentary is the least useful thing you
can read on HN.

Nobody learned anything useful from knowing that some guy with a GMail account
isn't pleased with the spam filter. What was this supposed to achieve? Some
long side-thread with people sharing anecdotes about whether or not GMail
worked for them? This is the sort of thing that gets made fun of at
n-gate.com.

Also:

    
    
        Please don't comment about the
        voting on comments. It never
        does any good, and it makes
        boring reading.
    

\--
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
ColinWright
Thank you for the response! That gives me something useful to be going on
with.

In contrast to your comment, I've always found the personal experiences of HN
users to be incredibly valuable data points, which is why I shared my own.
I'll re-evaluate that.

WRT the guidelines, I'm painfully aware of that one. While I appreciate its
wisdom, it means that one can never learn from the otherwise anonymous
downvotes, so to my mind it's worth taking the risk. In this case I really
have learned something.

Again, thank you.

~~~
nitrogen
As a personal anecdote, I've also noticed that people around me are less
interested in personal anecdotes in general. It seems more pronounced over
time. I could hypothesize that Facebook and Twitter give people all the
anecdotes they need, or that my anecdotes have become more poorly worded over
time, but I really have no idea what the cause is.

------
chrissnell
I love finger! Back in the early 90s, I wrote a thing that would let you see
what was playing on the CD-ROM in my desktop Linux machine. I used some finger
daemon that allowed scripts to be executed as part of a .plan. You would
finger music@somethingorother.vanderbilt.edu and a shell script would call
"cda" (a command-line version of xccd and it would look up the disc name and
track names from CDDB, pipe it through some sed and awk-foo and send it out to
the client. I got fingered from around the world all day long.

There were all sorts of fun things you could finger around the 'net. My
favorite was a VAX at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The latency was several
seconds. I posted about this years later on Slashdot and a former sysadmin
chided me and said that all of the fingers were chewing Ho their minuscule
satellite-provided bandwidth.

~~~
spc476
Back when finger was popular, I used to have the following line at the bottom
of my .plan file:

    
    
        Bus error - cored dumped
    

I caught a few sysadmins with that one.

~~~
ars
If you made .plan file a fifo, you could see when people fingered you, and
customize the response based on who it was.

For example:
[http://www.ram.org/computing/plan/plan.html](http://www.ram.org/computing/plan/plan.html)

------
mtkd
In case anyone hasn't read it already and may be interested - this is the
story of the Morris worm that leveraged a finger vuln in 1988:

[http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/courses/nidsS05/attacks/seely-...](http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/courses/nidsS05/attacks/seely-
RTMworm-89.html)

Robert T Morris is a YC partner now I understand.

~~~
wolfgang42
From
[https://www.ycombinator.com/people/](https://www.ycombinator.com/people/) :

 _> Robert Morris is a professor of computer science at MIT... In 1988 his
discovery of buffer overflow_ [sic] _first brought the Internet to the
attention of the general public._

------
tjalfi
The SAIL source to Les Earnest's finger program is here[0].

[0]
[https://www.saildart.org/FINGER.SAI[P,SYS]](https://www.saildart.org/FINGER.SAI\[P,SYS\])

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
That source code seems very strange. I'm not even sure what language it is.

On one hand, some things feel a high-level as C - such as many of the procs
starting with "proc oops". On the other hand, things like "proc netloc" seem
to have a chunk of assembly embedded in the middle of it. The use of symbols
in the code (e.g., "←", which seems to be the assignment operator) is also
interesting.

Even though I don't fully understand it, I find old code like this absolutely
fascinating. I also feel the same way about old electronics/electrical
manuals.

~~~
TurkTurkleton
Like tjalfi said, it's SAIL [0]. It was an ALGOL derivative.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIL_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIL_\(programming_language\))

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
Oh! I thought SAIL meant Stanford AI Lab in that context, I had no idea that
it was a programming language too.

Thanks!

------
delsarto
Finger still has some use; you can take any running job from
[https://zuul.openstack.org](https://zuul.openstack.org), extract the uuid and

finger uuid@zuul.openstack.org

and it will stream the job logs to you. Most of the code in

[https://git.zuul-
ci.org/cgit/zuul/tree/zuul/lib/fingergw.py](https://git.zuul-
ci.org/cgit/zuul/tree/zuul/lib/fingergw.py)

------
stmw
It's nice to know that no product managers, UX designers or vice presidents
were harmed in the process of developing "finger". :-)

------
scarface74
Slightly off topic, but one of Google's greatest services was not only
rescuing DejaNews Usenet archive but also archiving Usenet posts from 1981.
This type of pre web history would have been lost forever.

------
abathur
I've been kinda wishing for the past year or so that I'd stumble on a FaaS
provider that can handle traffic on arbitrary ports, so that I could serve
finger requests without needing to keep up with a VPS.

------
49bc
> _I enjoyed the comradery of those gentler times and have no regrets._

I had just closed twitter when I read that. Indeed, the times are not gentle
on the internet.

~~~
isostatic
Posts like this from 1990, and ones complaining about Eternal September,
remind me that no matter what generation you are, what year it is, people
always say "It was better in the old days"

------
donttrack
Its funny. I actually recently pulled out the Finger RFC to try to reimagine
how it could be adapted to the world of today.

