Nice to see this here today. A number of hosts the article mentions are on the startpage of lookit, a finger client I've been building: happynetbox, plan.cat, thebackupbox's finger webring, etc.
The start page exists because finger has no discovery layer. finger @host lists users. lookit makes that list selectable, so you can wander a server instead of querying one address at a time.
Perhaps a global database or a parallel project like a search engine focused on fingering is needed. The sources are scattered, and clients like yours would greatly benefit from that.
disclose: "AI is one more tool. I use it for mechanical tasks: polishing the wording, catching typos, suggesting synonyms, improving or adapting code blocks and translating the article between Spanish and English."
Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).
Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.
We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!
No, that I think would be Match.com or something along those lines. This is like the grandfather or grand-grandfather of Tinder, but not even intentionally.
What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.
Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.
Don't forget head, tail, mount, strip, touch, etc.
My GF when I was first learning these names was convinced the Unix principals did all this quite deliberately and "finger" was her headliner argument. Evidently, even in 1971 someone complained: https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-pinky-command/ (relevant to that source, Usenet/Net News/mailing lists may be another social network which never exactly died and even today LKML, zsh-workers, etc. are main communication avenues).
The start page exists because finger has no discovery layer. finger @host lists users. lookit makes that list selectable, so you can wander a server instead of querying one address at a time.
I just released a v0.2 beta, feedback welcome: https://github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit/releases/tag/v0.2.0...
Perhaps a global database or a parallel project like a search engine focused on fingering is needed. The sources are scattered, and clients like yours would greatly benefit from that.
I'd also like to mention that if you have Emacs, I also have my own client: https://git.andros.dev/andros/efinger.el
Was definitely an inspiration for lookit. And yes, a search engine would be cool!
AI smell?
[1] https://webfinger.net
Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.
We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!
What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.
Just one cell.
Heck, you could probably make a little program for HN to use the about box as the service and achieve the same thing.
My GF when I was first learning these names was convinced the Unix principals did all this quite deliberately and "finger" was her headliner argument. Evidently, even in 1971 someone complained: https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-pinky-command/ (relevant to that source, Usenet/Net News/mailing lists may be another social network which never exactly died and even today LKML, zsh-workers, etc. are main communication avenues).