John Carmack's .plan file

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14192/John-Carmack-Archive-plan-1998

by gtklocker • 15 years ago

113 32 15 years ago

bascule• 15 years ago

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

genbattle• 15 years ago

  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.

sgt• 15 years ago

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.

nvictor• 15 years ago

i came to say this. plus the annoying constant "upload something before you download..."

jacquesm2• 15 years ago

Scribd is a Y combinator company.

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

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

nailer• 15 years ago

Or more to the point: doesn't either Scribd or YC have some kind of code of ethics? Fake 'Download' and 'Play Now' buttons make the web worse, not better.

maqr• 15 years ago

I block all ads, so I often don't realize when a site is being evil. Those kind of ads sound pretty bad for Y Combinator's image, I wonder why it's being allowed.

joblessjunkie• 15 years ago

...especially since a .plan file is a plain text file, and John Carmack's are readily browsable as HTML files on any number of web sites.

http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/plan.html

rachelbythebay• 15 years ago

I've learned to mechanically translate "scribd.com link" into "no content past the third page for some reason". I don't even bother with them now.

That means I actually wind up preferring the original PDFs or whatever when HN puts a (scribd) link out to the side! PDF isn't exactly a walk in the park either, but it's far better than this scribd thing.

patrickyeon• 15 years ago

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

jpadvo• 15 years ago

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...

mbowcock• 15 years ago

As an aside I just saw this a couple of days ago and while activity seems to be slow to non-existent this looks like an interesting project.

Webfinger - http://code.google.com/p/

Basically finger 2.0 for the web

yahelc• 15 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/

chimeracoder• 15 years ago

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

dasil003• 15 years ago

... and 80s ... and 70s.

irrelative• 15 years ago

Only it scaled better.

jacquesm2• 15 years ago

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

sriramk• 15 years ago

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...

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• 15 years ago

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

duncans• 15 years ago

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

kghose• 15 years ago

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

gnu8• 15 years ago

No scribd links.

yesbabyyes• 15 years ago

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

jeffnappi• 15 years ago

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

achille• 15 years ago

Was this only for employees ID internally?

trotsky• 15 years ago

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)

mahmud• 15 years ago

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

rwmj• 15 years ago

:-)

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.

ChrisArchitect• 15 years ago

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

John Carmack's .plan file

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