Finger: the 1971 social network that never died | Andros Fenollosa

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It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971.

No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your entire profile fits in a single plain text file that you control. John Carmack (co-founder of id Software and programmer of Doom and Quake) used it as a development journal. And chances are you already have a client installed on your operating system without knowing it.

But the most incredible part is that, half a century later, it still works. And do not rule out a comeback.

Its name is Finger, and you can try it right now.

The finger client comes preinstalled on macOS and most Unix systems. On Debian or Ubuntu you install it with apt install finger. Windows also ships its finger.exe. And if you live in Emacs, you have M-x finger, included in net-utils.el out of the box.

finger random@happynetbox.com<br>It will randomly show you a Finger account hosted on happynetbox.com, one of the many directories (or hosts) that make publishing easy if you do not have your own server. Fun, isn't it?

But its origin is just as interesting.

Origin

In 1971, at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), researchers shared a computer running the WAITS time-sharing system. The only way to know who was connected was the WHO command, which spat out an endless, hard-to-read list.

Well, Les Earnest, one of the lab's engineers, kept seeing a scene that repeated daily.

I frequently saw people running their fingers down the WHO display saying things like "There's Don and that's Pattie but I don't know when Tom was last seen."

People ran their fingers down the screen, hence the name. Earnest wrote a program that returned that information in a human format: real names, locations and, most importantly, how long each terminal had been idle. He was a practical engineer who preferred talking in person to talking through the computer. He wanted to know whether it was worth getting up and walking down the hall to find someone.

As a side effect, he had invented network presence, or the social network.

In 1977 the protocol was formalized in RFC 742, written by Ken Harrenstien. It was so primitive that only 3 sites supported it: SAIL, SRI and MIT's ITS machines. A little later, the networked implementation was handled by Earl Killian at MIT and Brian Harvey at Stanford.

In 1991, RFC 1288 was written, the definitive specification, making the earlier versions obsolete.

The first microblog: the .plan and .project files

On top of the protocol, there was content. Besides telling whether you were connected, Finger showed the contents of two text files in your home folder: .plan and .project. The original idea was to announce what you were working on and what you planned to do. A kind of static professional "status", with no interactions like likes or comments. As if it were a changelog of your day-to-day or your project.

People did what we always do: humanize it. They started including poems, jokes, personal diaries, ASCII art, articles... anything! Anyone in the world could read your .plan with a simple finger your-user@your-host. Many consider it, rightly, the first microblog on the internet.

As I mentioned, the most famous example is John Carmack 's .plan. For years, any fan could type finger johnc@idsoftware.com (dead nowadays) and read, straight from the source, what the graphics engine of their favorite games was up to. He wrote from 1996 to 2010. Today they are preserved, archived on GitHub. It is one of the most valuable technical documents in video game history, and it was distributed over a 1971 protocol. TOO ANGRY TO DIE!

Do not expect prose that brings tears to your eyes, either. His style was telegraphic: task lists and bugs without a word to spare. But every so often a bombshell dropped. For example, on August 18, 1997 he announced through his .plan, not through a website or a press conference, that he planned to release the Doom source code:

John Carmack's .plan for Aug 18, 1997

I get asked about the DOOM source code every once in a while, so here is a<br>full status update:

[...]

The DOOM code should be a lot more interesting. It is better written, 32 bit,<br>and portable. There are several interesting projects that immediately present<br>themselves for working with the code. GLDOOM and a packet server based<br>internet DOOM spring to mind.<br>Glory kill!

The first IoT device spoke Finger

Around 1982, some students at Carnegie Mellon University (Mike Kazar, David Nichols, John Zsarnay and Ivor Durham) got tired of walking down to the department's Coca-Cola machine and finding it empty or with warm bottles. They installed microswitches to detect how many bottles were in each column and how long they had been cooling.

They wired it all up to the network and exposed the status over Finger. From any computer you could run finger coke@cmu.edu (the machine's exact name changed over the...