.plan

Why we have stopped making cool protocols like this? It seems Internet had really cool protocols back in the day and we had so many possibilities. Now it seems we are stuck with HTTP.<p>Not saying HTTP is bad. It just seems like we have given up on possibilities. I remember, almost a decade ago, Nokia had a mobile web server for Symbian devices which basically hosted HTTP server on the phone[0]. You could message the owner of phone directly through a URL. The request would be handled by server on phone!<p>No one makes anything like that anymore. Everyone is just building on top of APIs and services provided by MANGA who would obviously not put any effort in such projects.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkdekho.in&#x2F;254nl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkdekho.in&#x2F;254nl</a>

.plan files were a great way to follow Quake development.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ESWAT&#x2F;john-carmack-plan-archive" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ESWAT&#x2F;john-carmack-plan-archive</a>

Fun Fact: MIT still runs a finger server at mit.edu (no subdomain!) that lets you look up anyone with a registered account. Years ago it was publically accessible, but now you need to make your request from within the MIT network to get a response.<p>You could also get the schedule for movies shown on campus with `finger @lsc.mit.edu`. That finger server is actually still running but looks like it&#x27;s not being updated.

Can someone explain what this is?

I&#x27;m appreciating some of the attempts of SQL injection<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plan.cat&#x2F;~yes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plan.cat&#x2F;~yes</a>

Wow, it&#x27;s one thing to read something and harken back to my early days at school and work, but actually running finger from a shell and seeing something real come back caused this deep wave of nostalgia to roll over me. Part of me really misses those days.<p>Very cool.

This was my somewhat dated .plan from &quot;finger don@mimsy.umd.edu&quot; around 1986 or so...<p>Through the Hacking Glass:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.donhopkins.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;catalog&#x2F;text&#x2F;hacking-glass.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.donhopkins.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;catalog&#x2F;text&#x2F;hacking-glass.h...</a>

John Carmack&#x27;s .plan was the first Twitter.

I haven&#x27;t thought about .plan files in years. This takes me back to setting those on the HP-UX account I had at college, and fingering my friends&#x27; .plan files daily. That was my first real encounter with actual multi-user, family-tree Unix, though I had been horsing around with some of the various Linuxen available in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s.<p>Mine usually had snarky movie or TV quotes. Usually from MST3K, Babylon 5 or Army of Darkness.

&gt;D. Zimmerman, The Finger User Information Protocol, RFC 1288, December, 1991<p>Almost 30 years old.

Shouldn&#x27;t this have content in Catalan to qualify for a .cat domain?

My almamater, Grinnell College, has a still active social network Grinnell Plans, which extended from .plan usage for social networking on the college&#x27;s Vax computer system.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grinnellplans.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;faq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grinnellplans.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;faq.html</a>

Man, this takes me back. I had a .plan file that was an ever-growing list of quotations, often in dialogue with each other. The only one I still remember was one from a friend who said, &quot;you should put more quotes in your finger file.&quot;

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;rfc742.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;rfc742.txt</a>

As a side note, I was capturing all my side projects via plan style files,<p>so I wrote a time tracker for it following a simple format that would calculate roughly how long I spent on each project.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;keyle&#x2F;mdtimesheet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;keyle&#x2F;mdtimesheet</a>

I still have a .plan file, for nostalgia&#x27;s sake:<p><pre><code> $ cat .plan To be the only person on this system who uses this obsolete feature of finger.</code></pre>

Honestly I think every website should respond to a <i>finger</i> request with some information about its users.

Few minutes in and, yep, someone is brute-forcing the forgot password.

We used to run a site at quakefinger.com that scanned all the quake and eventually gamedev plan .files. It was awesome. Sadly the wayback doesn&#x27;t go back to the earliest days but you can get the flavor here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20000520015354&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;quakefinger.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20000520015354&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;quakefinge...</a>

Some clever and funny stuff. Also actually found something useful.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plan.cat&#x2F;~wasabis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plan.cat&#x2F;~wasabis</a>

I just typed finger @plan.cat and windows 11 responded, my mind is blown away by the fact they included finger in it.<p>was finger in windows 10 as well?

Count registered users<p><pre><code> finger @plan.cat|wc -l</code></pre>

one html file, one css file. very nice.

When I was in college, (1991-1995) I use to enjoy running finger on the unix terminals at the library and reading everyone&#x27;s .plan. It was popular to put ASCII art in your .plan which I always enjoyed. I collected all that ASCII art and, in 1994, made a website that featured all of it. It no longer has my college URL anymore, but it&#x27;s still online and gets a respectable amount of daily traffic. (Although interest in ASCII art has steadily waned, since fixed width fonts aren&#x27;t really a thing on mobile devices.)<p>If I remember correctly, you could also finger some of the soda machines on campus and check their inventory.

Who made this? Is the source available somewhere? It&#x27;s very cool

My first impression of this was: I thought it was some sort of doxxing site where people&#x27;s online pseudonym was matched with their legal name. Oh how I was wrong.

Hmf. I wanted to cobble together a little thing that could update the plan from a shell. Using curl, I can&#x27;t get anything other than a 500 reply when posting to &#x2F;login, even after storing and sending the cookie from an initial get request, retrieving the csrf token for the form, and matching all the headers from a normal browser session.<p>If anybody manages to get a working login with curl, I&#x27;d love to see the magic incantation you used.

On a MacOS Terminal window:<p>finger tony@plan.cat

This could be something. Tagline: &quot;If you have to ask, you&#x27;ll never know.&quot; Hat tip RHCP.

Welp. I ruined emojis for everyone.<p>¯\\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

`finger` always made me uneasy.

finger superluminal@plan.cat

No .project files?

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finger.farm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finger.farm</a>

This is neat. I am more surprised however that the `finger` utility is still shipped with macOS!

Twitter has replaced it.

Much as I bemoan the loss of elegant text-based <i>protocols</i> like this, I am simultaneously thankful that I can interact on a <i>platform</i> that retains a great deal of the spare, text-heavy aesthetic and doesn&#x27;t come riddled with various &quot;social&quot; integrations, analytics, and auto-playing video trash.

Simple is beautiful.

I love it

What is this?