technology-history
Latest stories covering technology-history, with summaries and links to related coverage.
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Finger: Social network that never died
opinion
16 min read
Finger is a network protocol created at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1971 to show who was using a shared WAITS time-sharing computer, including names, locations and terminal idle time. Ken Harrenstien formalized it in RFC 742 in 1977, and RFC 1288 became its definitive specification in 1991. A Finger client connects to a server’s TCP port 79, sends a username or an empty query, receives plain text, and closes the connection. Finger servers commonly returned users’ .plan and .project text files, originally intended to describe current work and plans. Users turned .plan files into public diaries, technical logs, jokes and other personal publishing. John Carmack used a .plan file from 1996 to 2010 as a development journal and announced plans to release Doom’s source code there on August 18, 1997. Carnegie Mellon students also exposed a Coca-Cola machine’s stock and bottle-cooling data through Finger around 1982. Security and privacy concerns drove Finger’s decline, particularly after the 1988 Morris worm exploited a fingerd buffer overflow. Some systems still include Finger clients, including Windows’ finger.exe, which attackers abused in 2020 to retrieve malware payloads. Current services and software, including Happy Net Box, Finger.Farm and plan.cat, continue to host and modernize .plan-style publishing; plan.cat also bridges Finger posts to ActivityPub.
Software, from First Principles
opinion
46 min read
Smartphones and laptops operate on microscopic circuits made from purified rock, enabling the control of electron flow for computing tasks. This technology results from centuries of contributions from various scientific and engineering disciplines.
Wirth's Revenge
14 min read
Niklaus Wirth's 1995 essay "A Plea for Lean Software" critiques the software industry's inefficiencies, coining Wirth's Law: software is becoming slower at a rate faster than hardware improves. Wirth reflects on the simplicity of interactive text editors from 25 years prior compared to modern software complexity.