Background of .plan files: the 1977 Finger Protocol

I feel like such an oldie reading things like this :-) Watching the younger generations rediscover things that I have lived through is making me gravely aware of my own mortality today. I'm expecting somebody to point out an article on Kermit next, or be astonished that once upon a time some people used email from a VAX vt100 terminal to access the public ftp server on nic.funet.fi :D

While I've never seen anyone use .plan or .project files, the finger command is still widely used on MIT's network. In fact, MIT's user search (http://web.mit.edu/search.html) is just a front-end for the finger command.

It does raise some privacy concerns though, as you can see here: http://amap.mit.edu/

Also, there was something called "Faces" or "Picons" which were kind of a precursor to Gravatar which showed you images that corresponded to emails, domains, and more. Indiana University had a Web service for performing these lookups using finger[0] (looks like it has since been turned off). For example, here is Richard Stallman[1] and here is Dennis Ritchie (RIP)[2].

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172305/http://www.cs.indi...

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172449/http://www.cs.indi...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20070630172341/http://www.cs.indi...

I posted this after being really inspired by the HN post about John Carmack's .plan file[1], and then doing some research to discover what exactly a .plan file is.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3367230