Finger: the 1971 social network that never died

It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971.

No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your entire profile fits in a single plain text file that you control. John Carmack (co-founder of id Software and programmer of Doom and Quake) used it as a development journal. And chances are you already have a client installed on your operating system without knowing it.

But the most incredible part is that, half a century later, it still works. And do not rule out a comeback.

Its name is Finger, and you can try it right now.

The finger client comes preinstalled on macOS and most Unix systems. On Debian or Ubuntu you install it with apt install finger . Windows also ships its finger.exe . And if you live in Emacs, you have M-x finger , included in net-utils.el out of the box.

finger [email protected]

It will randomly show you a Finger account hosted on happynetbox.com , one of the many directories (or hosts) that make publishing easy if you do not have your own server. Fun, isn't it?

But its origin is just as interesting.

Origin

In 1971, at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), researchers shared a computer running the WAITS time-sharing system. The only way to know who was connected was the WHO command, which spat out an endless, hard-to-read list.

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