On Mar 24, 6:38 pm, Les Earnest <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Howard Kveck wrote:
> > In article <[email protected]>, Bob Schwartz
> > <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >>[email protected] wrote:
>
> >>>Les Earnest did:
> >>>http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/2100-1035_11-6168685.html?tag=nl...
>
> >>>I raced in the Norcal/Nevada district in the early-mid 80s. Les (and
> >>>IIRC his wife) was a frequent official at bike racing events. I had
> >>>no idea his day job was so impressive. Thank you Les for coming out
> >>>on weekends to listen to sweaty guys argue over who got 6th place in
> >>>the cat 3 criterium around an industrial park.
>
> >http://groups.google.com/group/rec.bicycles.racing/browse_thread/thre...
>
> >>Les didn't invent the internets, but he knew a lot of the players.
>
> > One of the reasons that thread is so great is the Dave Bailey response to AA:
>
> >http://groups.google.com/group/rec.bicycles.racing/msg/8c2f4571b760e792
>
> Thanks to all for the kind words. However if you read the first article
> carefully you will see that the use of Finger as a blogging service was
> accidental rather than something I planned. Another unplanned use of the
> Plan files was to disseminate public keys for private communications.
> They were used in both ways for about 20 years before the Web came into
> existence in the mid-1990s
I think that unanticipated uses of a tool are usually a sign that it's
a good, flexible tool. You can think of finger as one of the first
(probably THE first, but I'm not nerd-history major) personal-info
publishing tools on any internet, much less the big-I Internet.
One famous, unmentioned use of .plan files was as the primary info
source from id Software about in-development projects. John Carmack
and many of the other main developers had regularly-updated .plan
files, and used them to discuss what they were working on. There were
some famous spats that played out there.
Last updated in 2005, John Carmack's .plan now just has a URL that
points at his irregularly-updated blog:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent Updates
id Software is famous for its Doom and Quake games, which pretty much
set the benchmarks for first-person shooters for a decade or so.
> Incidentally, one university reportedly banned the use of Finger under
> that name on the grounds that it was a dirty word. They supposedly chose
> a more politically correct name but I now forget what it was.
>
> -Les Earnest
It takes a rather dirty mind to see "finger," even in its verb form,
primarily as a dirty word. I trust they also banned log files,
nslookup, child processes, kill, daemons...
I sense .projection,
