To be fair, it never had much of a life to begin with. I bet I can count on one finger (sorry) the number of folks who ever saw the cute ASCII art in my .plan.

Carmack may well have been the only person in history to have put finger to good use. Even back in those days, using your .plan for actual status updates was virtually unheard-of.

For no real reason other than I thought it was fun.

Furthermore, the vast majority of workstation computers at the department for informatics and at the department of mathematics are running RHEL, so it's not just a handful of computers.

As for how many were actually making active use of finger and in particular .plan files, that was probably just a handful of people. I was one such person for a while after having learned about it and thinking it was kind of neat, but I eventually gave up on maintaining my .plan file and focused on other ways to share things.

After all, it requires that a port is exposed to the world for someone to read it.