A nostalgic look at the `finger` command, a 1971 UNIX utility that let users query information about other users on shared systems. Still present on macOS today, it fell out of favour due to privacy concerns, the shift away from multi-user shared machines, and its plaintext nature. The post traces the history from Bell Labs and early Linux days through MUDs and school networks, explains related legacy utilities (write, uucp, telnet, GECOS fields), and draws parallels to modern equivalents like GitHub profiles and pinned tweets. The author also built a finger server in Go that serves GitHub profile data, accessible via the classic finger protocol.
Sort: