Finger’s 1977 status reports told coworkers where you sat and when you last typed

The computer knew where you were sitting, how long you had been idle and, if you volunteered it, how to reach you at home. Workplace presence had a remarkably thorough vocabulary in 1977. The away message could also claim you had left the planet, which seems a reasonable response to that much availability.

The Name/Finger specification describes a small request-and-response exchange. A blank command line asks for the system’s current users. A name narrows the query to a person. The server returns its report and closes the connection, with the precise contents depending on the system answering.

That loose formatting rule leaves room for an unusually human collection of outputs. A list can identify a person, a terminal location and minutes since typing or job activity. The examples put Don Knuth in room 205 Library. A technical protocol has turned into a directory with enough context to tell you where to walk.

The offline case adds the .plan mechanism. A person can leave a short text message for the server to include in a response. That separates a machine’s observation of activity from what the person actually wants colleagues to know. The computer can count idle minutes; only the person can explain why those minutes accumulated.

One sample preserves Charles Frankston’s plan, which begins, “I’ll be visiting another planet til about December 15.” The rest offers an appropriately cosmic method of contact. It is an official protocol example with an out-of-office gag inside it, a nice change from examples that introduce the world to yet another person named Foo.

Another sample includes Brian Harvey’s home-contact details and routine. Reading that now makes the scope of the report more striking than its transport. There are several different promises bundled together: identifying a colleague, describing a workstation, inferring activity and offering a route to reach someone away from it.

The practical distinction remains useful when a team chooses what to display. An idle timer reports an absence of input. It cannot establish an absence of work. A person might be reading, talking or staring at the screen while a machine slowly completes the task everybody asked it to do. The keyboard’s biography of your day will have omissions.

The old specification lets a reader inspect exactly where those facts came from. Some came from system state; others came from the person’s own file. Treating both as one undifferentiated status would make the report easier to display and harder to interpret, especially when a colleague takes the idle count more seriously than the away message.

Finger’s charm is that the people remain visible inside the machinery. Names, rooms and plans sit beside jobs and terminal identifiers, with no attempt to sand every response into the same personality. One of those people is still on another planet in the preserved example, and the protocol never records his return.

Interplanetary roaming charges may apply.