Talk:Finger

Why Stanford?

I wonder why someone at Stanford invented it? They only had the one machine (I looked at an early ARPANET host table, and there was only one machine on the Stanford IMP, SAIL) - so no real internal need. (MIT, I can see the need; with AI, DM and ML.)

It started as a local tool to see logged-in users, their physical location, and the whereabouts of free terminals. The earliest version on record I find is this one: https://www.saildart.org/FINGER.SAI[S,LES]1

I guess it was a short leap to provide this data over the network, although that was years later. SAIL didn't have a server at first. As of January 1978: "At this writing, only the following sites respond to a network FINGER: all MIT ITS sites (ai, mc, ml, dm), sri-kl, sri-ka, and office-1."

Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 18:48, 9 August 2023 (CEST)

On the other hand, the 1977 RFC implies SAIL did have a server, and I found FNGSER.MID[NET,MRC] from February 1978. Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 19:17, 9 August 2023 (CEST)