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Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).

Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.

We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!



There was a fellow student at university who put the entire Hunting Of The Snark in their .plan file. It scrolled for a while.


Haha that was the case at my uni too. I met my (ex) girlfriend on the unix system at uni through `talk` and `to` [1]. A lot of the CS students (me included) had .plans that we would update regularly as sort of proto-blogs. Definitely a lot of finger stalking (and `flon` [1] stalking as well).

[1] https://mewburn.net/luke/software.html


I'm dying! Using Telnet to flirt. The father of Tinder XD


No, that I think would be Match.com or something along those lines. This is like the grandfather or grand-grandfather of Tinder, but not even intentionally.

What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.


match.com is a company that literally owns Tinder and nearly every "dating site" btw (even the one you're thinking of, it doesn't matter, it owns all of them including the ones that used to pride themselves on not being owned by match.com).


In the late 80s, a friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend via email while they were both sitting in the same computer lab.


This whole thread has me a little puzzled, in the UK 'fingering' is the de-facto term for a sexual act. Is that not the case elsewhere?

"Fingering was huge at my university" is, in the UK, very true, but I feel that's not the context you're using it in!


Yes, that is, and was, also the case in the US. Back when the finger command was in common use, the double entendre was not lost on anybody.


It was awesome to see which lab and xterm someone was on in college so you could pop by. Plus, when you used the xterms, you never had to wait for an open computer!


Sounds like Berkeley.




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