Comment by sedatk
1 day ago
Finger was the original Twitter. We used to get updates on Quake's development from John Carmack by fingering his email. He used to write elaborate ".plan" files too, no nonsense character limits were in sight yet. It was magical. It worked like this:
$ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
No retweets, no likes, no notifications, no HN frontpage, but John Carmack kept writing them, and we kept reading. Even without any amplification dynamics, it was still engaging.
I've tried the same now, 30 years after my last finger. It wasn't even installed on Ubuntu by default. I had to install it, and expectedly:
$ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
finger: connect: Connection timed out
Finger still exists at sdf.org
A couple on shodan [1a][1b] Maybe we should make finger great again, but with TLS. fingers? Looks like there is a draft [2]
[1a] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=finger+%2Bport+79
[1b] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=finger
[2] - https://github.com/noveltylanterns/fingers
Oh pretty please, if we revive this protocol, can we please pick a better name? Like, any name? Literally anything else, that doesn’t evoke weirdly sexual imagery?
10 replies →
Any gopher client can do finger too: