Forgotten Internet: Giving (or Getting) The Finger

January 30, 2025 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Hey, you know that guy in accounting, Marco? If you want to find out more about him, you’d probably go surf LinkedIn or maybe a social media site. Inside a company, you might look on instant messaging for a profile and even find out if he is at his desk or away. But back in the 1970s, those weren’t options. But if Marco was on the computer system, maybe you could finger him. While that sounds strange to say today, Finger was a common service provided by computer services at the time. It was like a LinkedIn profile page for the 1970s.

Based on RFC 742, Finger was the brainchild for [Les Earnest]. From a user’s point of view, you put a few files in your home directory (usually .project and .plan; both hidden files), and when someone “fingered” you, they’d see some human-friendly output about your account like your name and office location, if you were logged in or not, and the contents of your project and plan files.

Modern versions may also show your public PGP key and other data. You could usually put a file in your home directory called .nofinger if you wanted to stop people from fingering you.

Continue reading “Forgotten Internet: Giving (or Getting) The Finger” →

Forgotten Internet: UUCP

January 16, 2025 by Al Williams 82 Comments

What’s Forgotten Internet? It is the story of parts of the Internet — or Internet precursors — that you might have forgotten about or maybe you missed out on them. This time, we’re looking at Unix-to-Unix Copy, more commonly called UUCP. Developed in the late 1970s, UUCP was a solution for sending messages between systems that were not always connected together. It could also allow remote users to execute commands. By 1979, it was part of the 7th Edition of Unix.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie may have used UUCP on a PDP-11 like this one. (Photo via Computer History Museum/Gwen Bell)

Operation was simple. Each computer in a UUCP network had a list of neighbor systems. Don’t forget, they weren’t connected, so instead of an IP address, each system had the other’s phone number to connect to a dial up modem. You also needed a login name and password. Almost certainly, by the way, those modems operated at 300 baud or less.

If a computer could dial out, when someone wanted to send something or do a remote execution, the UUCP system would call a neighboring computer. However, some systems couldn’t dial out, so it was also possible for a neighbor to call in and poll to see if there was anything you needed to do. Files would go from one system to another using a variety of protocols.

Continue reading “Forgotten Internet: UUCP” →