Background of .plan files: the 1977 Finger Protocol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

by jpadvo • 15 years ago

19 7 15 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

jpadvo2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.org ?

jpadvo2• 15 years ago

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.

clarkm• 15 years ago

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/

morganpyne• 15 years ago

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

waffle_ss• 15 years ago

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...

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172449/http://www.cs.indi...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172341/http://www.cs.indi...

ars• 15 years ago

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face

Background of .plan files: the 1977 Finger Protocol

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