So which internet protocol came first, Finger, Gopher, Spartan and Gemini. I'll guess that Gemini is the new-ish internet protocol.
Sep 27 · 2 weeks ago
13 Comments ↓
There was a whole lifetime between the two sets
👻 darkghost · Sep 27 at 18:38:
The early internet was unencrypted. So a protocol like Gemini is long after the older protocols. Spartan uses gemtext and must therefore come after Gemini. Being an old man who yells at clouds, I was around for finger and gopher which were eons before Gemini and other smallnet protocols. Finger predates gopher by quite a bit as I vaguely remember gopher being the new thing but finger was always there.
Gopher is as old as http, gemini if from like 2018, spartan is based in gemini
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · Sep 28 at 02:36:
I don't get how finger is used socially. Can someone who was there (or who uses it now) explain it to me? The wikipedia page kinda explained how it was supposed to work, but that doesn't help me understand how it actually got used.
It's more useful on a timesharing system. You run a command to see who else is using the computer and see a userid you don't recognize, for example, "spc". You would then run the finger command and get a bit of information about that userid, like their real name, maybe their office location and phone extension, and maybe what they're currently working on.
It was later amended to work across a network, so one could then finger, say, spc@conman.org and get information about the userid spc on the host conman.org. It's not really used anymore except for a few people on the smol net.
👻 darkghost · Sep 28 at 12:58:
Exactly this. It is a timeshare holdover. I seem to recall it was used on IRC to verify something and clients like mIRC had a built in finger server. Smallnet applications these days finger can serve a small amount of content. Not practical or anything.
one could write something in files .project and .plan in their home directory.
then finger would show those.
i don't know the difference between these two but publishing that way was like writing statuses today.
Finger as a social networking tool
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🦔 bsj38381 [OP] · Sep 28 at 23:40:
Ok, sorry, I messed up on calling Finger an internet protocol lol, my mistake.
isn't it application layer protocol?
answering your question, i think finger predates gopher.
gopher predates gemini.
after gemini spartan and titan have happened as slight variations.
No, it's an actual protocol, TCP/UDP port 79, and described in RFC-1288 (and some eariler ones, but RFC-1288 is the last update of the protocol).
I recall using Gopher over a 2400 baud modem, using Telix on DOS in the early 90s. And then one day I came across a 'link' in a gopherspace that started with "http://" and wondered what that was all about...
It also provided "telnet://" urls, and thus my mudding addiction began...
@stack, wrong hand. that's the stuff:
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