🚀 go-pugleaf

>man page gave the breakdown of biff as "Be Informed iF mail arrives and who
>it is From" (ack), but apparently conventional wisdom has it that biff was
>the name of the programmer's dog.

Heidi Stettner's dog, biff, who barked when the mail came. When
Armando Stettner (no relation) got a dog he named it Heidi.

>As to finger, however, I was quite stumped.  Programs with this name and
>function appear on a variety of systems.  I had always assumed it came from
>the old crime movie usage ("Boiz, I think Bugzy has squealed to the cops and
>fingered Guido as the one who iced the boss..."), and not the vulgar.  In
>other words, finger :-- to point out, describe in detail.  Does anyone have
>any better guesses?

Someone probably has the truth but finger certainly goes back at least
as far as the mid-late 70's on ITS systems. Although it probably
doesn't pre-date Unix it didn't appear on Unix until the early 80's
(in any generaly distribution, no doubt someone had hacked something
like it onto a local Unix earlier, I think I did one of the first
widely distributed finger daemons and network extensions of finger for
Unix just after 4.2 with TCP came out (the 4.2 finger didn't support
remote finger), around 1983 tho "fing" came out shortly thereafter and
ended up being more commonly used.)

The silly name even has a DARPA RFC for the finger protocol, I'd bet
the image of pointing out someone is correct.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die    | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | b...@world.std.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202        | Login: 617-739-WRLD

Ahh, finger. What a great name for a command. It has caused much amusement 
for me in the past.

I once asked a female friend why she had this silly stuff in her .plan
file. "Oh, I put it in there months ago and then forgot about it. I never
finger myself ya see. Why would I want to finger myself? So I just...." 
Followed by a red face and laughter all around...

Or go up to some girl in the terminal room and address her by name. "How
do you know my name??" "Well I just fingered you"

Cheep joke, but great conversation starter... Or ender if she is shy...

Ej

|Ahh, finger. What a great name for a command. It has caused much amusement 
|for me in the past.

Ah yes, that reminds me...

Long before finger or even BSD, our Unix 32V system had a program
called "pp", for personal profile. Our system had quotas and all that
because it's hard otherwise to manage Vax resources for 50 or more
simultaneous users. (Those were the bad old days.) So I went up to
this girl and started off:

You must be Kathy.
Yes, how did you know?
I did a "pp" on you.
Well, shame on you.

I wasn't so good at repartee in those days. I turned red.

In article <1990Feb19.1...@world.std.com> b...@world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:
>Someone probably has the truth but finger certainly goes back at least
>as far as the mid-late 70's on ITS systems.

FINGER originated on the DECsystem-10 at the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (SU-AI, now SAIL.Stanford.EDU).  It was
written by Les Earnest in the SAIL (a cousin of ALGOL) programming
language.  This was in the late 1960's or early 1970's.

Ken Harrenstein implemented FINGER at the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (MIT-AI) as NAME.  A FINGER protocol was implemented soon
afterwards.  This was in the mid 1970's.

The next version of FINGER was for Tenex and TOPS-20, writen by Mike
McMahon and Stuart Cracraft.  A later TOPS-20 FINGER was written (in
order of who worked on it) in the early 1980's by myself, Mike Peeler,
and David Eppstein.

By 1979, the number of FINGER servers had proliferated to the point
that everyone had given up on having "FINGER @*" (!!!) work.

I think the first Unix finger programs appeared by 1979 or so; I have
a bit set that UCLA-SECURITY had a finger program written by Lauren
Weinstein.
 _____     ____ ---+---   /-\   Mark Crispin           Atheist & Proud
 _|_|_  _|_ ||  ___|__   /  /   6158 Lariat Loop NE    R90/6 pilot
|_|_|_| /|\-++- |=====| /  /    Bainbridge Island, WA  "Gaijin! Gaijin!"
 --|--   | |||| |_____|   / \   USA  98110-2098        "Gaijin ha doko ka?"
  /|\    | |/\| _______  /   \  +1 (206) 842-2385      "Niichan ha gaijin."
 / | \   | |__| /     \ /     \ m...@CAC.Washington.EDU "Chigau. Gaijin ja nai.
kisha no kisha ga kisha de kisha-shita                  Omae ha gaijin darou."
sumomo mo momo, momo mo momo, momo ni mo iroiro aru    "Iie, boku ha nihonjin."
uraniwa ni wa niwa, niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru    "Souka. Yappari gaijin!"