Year: 1971
Port: 79
Created by: Les Earnest at Stanford AI Laboratory
A simple TCP protocol that serves a small, human-readable text file about a user: their name, email, login status, and the contents of two files — ~/.plan and ~/.project.
Les Earnest watched users literally run their fingers down the WHO printout on early ARPANET terminals, scanning for recognizable names. He named the new program after that gesture.
~/.plan was originally meant to hold a user's current and future plans — a professional status update before status updates existed. Informally, .plan files became personal manifestos, random musings, and links to things people were thinking about. The first social media profile.
~/.project describes current projects.
finger brennan@tilde.town finger brennan@tilde.pink
Both will return the contents of the respective .plan file. It's opt-in, low-infrastructure presence — a plain text file and a TCP connection.
~/.plan and ~/.project are both maintained as part of the tilde.town home directory. They are synced via rsync with sync-to-tilde.sh.
The protocol is simple enough to fit in your head. Any Linux machine can run a finger daemon. See the finger server setup page.
Bombadillo supports Finger natively alongside Gopher and Gemini.