In 1995-1196, I worked at an ISP. Our first step when trying to troubleshoot an access problem for a new user was to run the finger command on our server to see if the account had been provisioned yet.
30 years later, I still recall the time I had to calm down an angry customer after a frontline support tech told her that he was going to "finger her to find out what the problem is." He _really_ didn't think that one through!
I was bored on a flight with crap Internet and, like everyone else on that flight, entertained myself by reading random manpages on my Mac. I think I read the one for finger, and I think it's still from BSD4.4, as its last updated date is from 1993!
In other news, I was born too young to use finger, but I definitely used Hyper terminal on Windows which had a chat like console app that worked with it. (I think it's called CHAT.EXE; I wonder if Windows still includes it in their production images.)
I also still use w to see who's logged into stuff (useless on containers...but sometimes useful!) and the type command to print out definitions of functions from the absolute disaster that are my dotfiles (someday I'll clean them up!)
In ye olden days, computers were more often multiuser, shared, and expensive servers. The computer lab at my university contained a pool of SGI, AIX, HP-UX, Sun SPARC, Linux, and SCO (but no IBM) boxes available over ssh via round-robin dns. The intent was to teach portable software engineering rather than tying things to a particular, proprietary platform. The trend towards so-called "hermetic toolchains" is absurd, anti-tinkering, anti-standards, and anti-portability depending on concealed, opaque binary blobs. Don't even get me started about bazel or systemd.
I think they mean, the 80s utility that fell out of favor through the 90s.
Those of us who were alive across both those times, 80s and 90s are not just interchangeable symbols denoting "before my time".
In 1995-1196, I worked at an ISP. Our first step when trying to troubleshoot an access problem for a new user was to run the finger command on our server to see if the account had been provisioned yet.
30 years later, I still recall the time I had to calm down an angry customer after a frontline support tech told her that he was going to "finger her to find out what the problem is." He _really_ didn't think that one through!
And they say that developers are terrible at naming things lol.
Finger is a stoneage network tool. Saying it fell out of favour is like saying bashing nuts between rocks fell out of favour.
I was bored on a flight with crap Internet and, like everyone else on that flight, entertained myself by reading random manpages on my Mac. I think I read the one for finger, and I think it's still from BSD4.4, as its last updated date is from 1993!
In other news, I was born too young to use finger, but I definitely used Hyper terminal on Windows which had a chat like console app that worked with it. (I think it's called CHAT.EXE; I wonder if Windows still includes it in their production images.)
I also still use w to see who's logged into stuff (useless on containers...but sometimes useful!) and the type command to print out definitions of functions from the absolute disaster that are my dotfiles (someday I'll clean them up!)
Create your .plan and wall everyone now. ;P
In ye olden days, computers were more often multiuser, shared, and expensive servers. The computer lab at my university contained a pool of SGI, AIX, HP-UX, Sun SPARC, Linux, and SCO (but no IBM) boxes available over ssh via round-robin dns. The intent was to teach portable software engineering rather than tying things to a particular, proprietary platform. The trend towards so-called "hermetic toolchains" is absurd, anti-tinkering, anti-standards, and anti-portability depending on concealed, opaque binary blobs. Don't even get me started about bazel or systemd.
(r)who, finger, talk - I remember having really nice gui wrappers for these that ran on XWindows and let you see who was online and chat with them.
Why is a click bait headline necessary?
Your answer is embedded within your question. ;)