
John Carmack's .plan file - gtklocker
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14192/John-Carmack-Archive-plan-1998
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sriramk
This post inspired me to write a reply which I made into it's separate post at
[http://tumblr.sriramk.com/post/14419136146/on-carmack-and-
cu...](http://tumblr.sriramk.com/post/14419136146/on-carmack-and-cutler)

Copy-pasted below

"John Carmack is one of my heroes in the tech world. Not because of his
technical accomplishments and helping to create games that I’ve spent years of
my life on. But for his single minded obsession with his craft after two
decades. Every time he is on stage, he is so obviously in love with what he
does that it is infectious.

That was one of my favorite things about Dave Cutler back at Microsoft.

Here’s this legendary figure pushing 70 years who has accomplished more things
than most developers dream up. But he showed up at work every single day and
made checkins every single day - including Dec 25th and Jan 1st, something he
was proud of.

I was once at Microsoft campus late on a Sunday and walked past his office.
Spotting the familiar blue hue from his office, I looked inside and saw him
debugging something.

“Hey Dave,”, I said “Ever get bored of ntos and ntos/ke? You’ve been coding
there for…for like 20 years now?”

ntos is the core part of the Windows NT source tree and ke is where the kernel
code lives in. Where pretty much every source file would have a header with
Cutler’s name on it and a created date in the 80s.

He turned slowly, looked me over. Obviously not very thrilled about this
pipsqueak program manager interrupting him being in the ‘zone’. He then smiled
and said. “I love this stuff. What else do you want me to do? Be on a boat
somewhere?”

With that, he turned back to his debugger and went back to work. "

~~~
m_hughes
He's not 70. He was born in 1970.

~~~
duncans
I'm sure he's quite a bit older than me... here, Wikipedia says 1942
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler>

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sgt
Please tell me why PDFs are constantly being hosted on scribd.com? I find that
site extremely annoying with its ridiculous "shaking window" ads and fake
buttons that are meant to trick you to click on an ad.

~~~
jacquesm
Scribd is a Y combinator company.

~~~
JonnieCache
Yep. That's presumably why pdf links on here have that [scribd] link next to
them.

~~~
moe
It would be nice if HN could at least add a link to the raw PDF.

I wonder if PG even uses scribd himself?

For me the builtin PDF-Viewer in chrome works perfectly fine whereas scribd is
a terrible experience.

~~~
chaosprophet
Actually in this case it was the Scribd URL that was submitted. If a URL
pointing to a PDF had been submitted, then the title text would link to the
raw PDF and the appended '[scribd]' text would link to the Scribd version of
it.

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jpadvo
If anybody else was wondering what a .plan file is... it is part of the Finger
Protocol[1], put together in 1977:

> The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently
> logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user
> information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in
> the user's home directory. Often this file (maintained by the user) contains
> either useful information about the user's current activities, similar to
> micro-blogging, or alternatively all manner of humor.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol#Finger_user_inf...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol#Finger_user_information_protocol)

~~~
chimeracoder
I like to think of .plan files as Twitter for the 1990s.

~~~
irrelative
Only it scaled better.

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genbattle

      For me, while I do take a lot of pride in shipping a great product, the achievements along the way are more memorable. I don’t remember any of our older product releases, but I remember the important insights all the way back to using CRTC wraparound for infinate smooth scrolling in Keen (actually, all the way back to understanding the virtues of structures over parallel arrays in apple II assembly language..). Knowledge builds on knowledge.
    

Gems like this really show why Carmack has been such a successful developer. I
found his week-long getaways an interesting concept; I can definitely relate
to distractions often seeming like a really big problem in terms of momentum.
These days with the internet I think it would take much more to isolate
yourself and still be productive.

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patrickyeon
Also hosted in a good old-fashioned format at the John Carmack Archive
<http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/plan.html>

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bascule
I've never seen a .plan in PDF form before. I think it would be difficult for
finger to render this.

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kghose
With noscript, request policy and cookie blocking turned on, those have gotta
be the biggest fonts I have seen on a webpage...

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mahmud
Scribd, the most useful way to share a plan file on the internet.

~~~
rwmj
:-)

I was rather sad to find that the finger command is no longer installed by
default in Fedora. Moreover I can't find a reliable/up to date/secure finger
server. Latest one I can find hasn't had updates since 2006 which doesn't make
me feel confident enough to install it.

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jacquesm
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=973997>

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gnu8
No scribd links.

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yesbabyyes
Great memories, one of the first "blogs" I followed.

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ChrisArchitect
this is always great to rehash and reflect on.

the link right in the first page would have been easier to digest
<http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/> instead of this scribd garbage

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jeffnappi
Haha!! I remember /fingering/ Carmack back in the 90's... good times for all!

~~~
achille
Was this only for employees ID internally?

~~~
trotsky
nope, anyone could do it. A surprisingly large amount of people's workstations
or dev boxes were open to the net, or at least passed finger and a number of
others. '98 was on the waning edge of that but for years it was common
practice for people to use plan files as a blog like platform. Much different
security environment (and everyone had a ton of IP4)

