A collection of awesome things regarding the finger protocol ecosystem.
Finger is an early Internet-based social networks, with its origins in the early 1970s. Like with a lot of things from the early Internet — finger is decentralized.
finger'ing someone could return:
- personal information,
- contact information,
- references to that person's presence on other parts of the Internet,
- a short biography,
- a journal,
- articles,
- jokes,
- (so called) ASCII art (which could contain non-ASCII characters),
- animations,
- and more.
Historically people and even machines were identified by user names at a host name. For example:
Someone could request information from or about a user at a host using one of the historic finger terminal applications.
On the command-line, a simple finger request could be performed with something like the following:
finger [email protected]
A finger-protocol server could return anything it wanted. But the spirit of the finger-protocol is that the output should be human-legible first, given what technologies are available at the time (and programmer-legible & machine-legible second if at all).
Also, being a simple protocol, made creating a simple client often trivial for many. For example:
echo '/W cikrempeaux' | nc changelog.ca 79
- Clients (Terminal)
- Clients (GUI)
- Clients (Mobile Android)
- Clients (Mobile iOS)
- Clients (Mobile PWA)
- Servers
- Web Proxies
- Programming
- Specifications
- Articles
| Name | maintained | Unicode | custom switches | /W switch | user@host | description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BSD finger | ✔️ | ✔️ | (last updated July 22nd, 2000) one of the historic finger-protocol clients | |||
| finger | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | a modern finger-protocol client |
| GNU finger | ✔️ | ✔️ | (last updated October 15th, 1992) one of the historic finger-protocol clients | |||
| lynx | ✔️ | ✔️ | a terminal text-based web browser that also supports the finger-protocol |
- kristall — a GUI gemini-protocol browser that also supports the finger-protocol
- lagrange — a GUI gemini-protocol browser that also supports the finger-protocol
- finger.farm — a multi-user finger-protocol server
- wp-finger — turns WordPress into a finger-protocol server
- the finger api — proxies finger-protocol client requests, and returns the response from the finger-protocol server as JSON
- go-finger — implements the finger protocol, for the Go programming language, that can be used to create both clients & servers
- IETF RFC-742 — (published 1977) — the finger-protocol existed and was evolving for at least 6 years before RFC-742 was published; when RFC-742 was published in 1977, RFC-742's purpose was to attempt to describe the protocol that was implemented first by the
fingerprogram, and then by thenameprogram, as well as 3 running finger-sites that existed at the time —SAIL(SU-AI),SRI(SRI-(KA/KL)), andITS(MIT-(AI/ML/MC/DMS)); i.e., RFC-742 was not attempting to create a new protocol, but instead was an attempting to describe the protocol that already existed, was already implemented, and was already in use by client software, by server software, and by people; i.e., the finger-protocol was created by the person(s) who wrote the software - IETF RFC-1288 — (published 1991) — RFC-742, which was published in 1977, had some parts of it that were considered to be ambiguous by some; RFC-1288, published in 1991 (i.e., 14 years later after RFC-742 was published, and at least 20 years after the finger-protocol existed and was evolving), was an attempt to remove some of the ambiguity of RFC-742, to make it easier for both people who would implement a finger-protocol client or server, and to provide some guidance; however RFC-1288 added restrictions to the finger-protocol that did NOT exist in RFC-742; in 1991 some of these restrictions may have seemed reasonable, however today (in 2022) some of the restrictions probably do not make as much sense (and should probably be reconsidered)
- Finger Request Switch — (published 2022) — an update to the finger-protocol that permits custom finger-protocol switches, in addition to the
"/W"switch.
- fingerverse — a list of many finger-sites (finger-holes?), which is useful anyone who wants to try out or get started with finger.
- History of the Finger Protocol — (published 2000) — a history of the finger and its usage from the early 1970s to the year 2000
- The "Only" Coke Machine on the Internet — a story, from the early 1990s, about a pop vending machine whose status could be queried via finger
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