I used to work at Convex w/ Jay Finger, whose username was "finger". I thought i... | Hacker News

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OhMeadhbh 27 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Finger: the 1971 social network that never died

I used to work at Convex w/ Jay Finger, whose username was "finger". I thought it was funny I could `finger finger` and it would actually do something. This was back when we had multiple users per machine and in the old days if you didn't provide a domain name, the finger command would default to hitting `localhost`.

Also... I seem to remember more than one security issue with stock `fingerd` at the time. After the second or third flaw in fingerd, I think it was banned (as much as it could be) from machines at Convex. By the time I made it to IBM/AIX, it was a serious no-no to have running on your machines.

selcuka 26 days ago [–]

> in the old days if you didn't provide a domain name, the finger command would default to hitting `localhost`.

It still does (at least on my MacBook):

    $ finger myusername
    Login: myusername ...
    ...
    No Mail.
    No Plan.

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