// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY

Finger: Social network that never died

Published: 08/18/2026, 07:21 AM

It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your entire profile fits in a single plain text file that you control. John Carmack (co-founder of id Software and programmer of Doom and Quake) used it as a development journal. And chances are you already have a client installed on your operating system without knowing it. But the most incredible part is that, half a century later, it still works. And do not rule out a comeback. The finger client comes preinstalled on macOS and most Unix systems. On Debian or Ubuntu you install it with apt install finger. Windows also ships its finger.exe. And if you live in Emacs, you have M-x finger, included in net-utils.el out of the box. It will randomly show you a Finger account hosted on happynetbox.com, one of the many directories (or hosts) that make publishing easy if you do not have your own server. Fun, isn't it? In 1971, at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), researchers shared a computer running the WAITS time-sharing system. The only way to know who was connected was the WHO command, which spat out an endless, hard-to-read list. Well, Les Earnest, one of the lab's engineers, kept seeing a scene that repeated daily. I frequently saw people running their fingers down the WHO display saying things like "There's Don and that's Pattie but I don't know when Tom was last seen." People ran their fingers down the screen, hence the name. Earnest wrote a program that returned that information in a human format: real names, locations and, most importantly, how long each terminal had been idle. He was a practical engineer who preferred talking in person to talking through the computer. He wanted to know whether it was worth getting up and walking down the hall to find someone. As a side effect, he had invented network presence, or the social network.