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.

I just released a v0.2 beta, feedback welcome: https://github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit/releases/tag/v0.2.0...

Related fun site: plan.cat (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248368 )

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 encryption, no headers, no sessions. Pure simplicity.

AI smell?

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.

I like it.

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.

finger is the best-named utility of the Unix world.