11/18/2003 Entry: ""
Posted by Maynard @ 11:56 AM MST
.plan - The Original BlogWare
I'm feeling nostalgic for the old Unix way of doing things. The concept of a daily log available on the Internet is almost as old as the Internet itself. Way back in the day, when people had to keep track of the amount of time they spent using computers, everyone had an account. These accounts were stored on a central server, much the way websites are today. But back then you didn't need a fancy, bolted-onto-the-user-interface browser to surf, you could do it from a plain black and white screen, using a keyboard instead of a mouse. "But they mouse is better! It's easier!"
Cry me a river.
If you wanted to know what your colleague at another university was doing, you fingered his account. Now, before you let your mind descend into the crass world of crude mockery, learn some terms: finger was the name of a program that allowed you to determine certain information about an account on a server, such as the person's real name. You could completely control what information was disclosed, which made it only as secure as you allowed it to be. One piece of information that was available was the users plan - or more precisely, his .plan. For example, you could issue the command
$ finger sales@matthewmaynard.net
and the matthewmaynard.net server would return the following:
sales@matthewmaynard.net
User Name: sales
Real Name: Evil Genius who does not reveal his true identity
sales@matthewmaynard.net .plan file:
30Nov1986
Began planning the takeover of the world. Items needed: paper plate, cement truck, nuclear bomb. Searching for hardest to find item first (paper plate).
29 Nov1986
Ate. Slept. Wrote summary of research.
28Nov1986
Concluded research into arrays of complex imaginary numbers. Bought aspirin.
Note that the more recent entries were placed at the top, that way the reader did not have to scroll through page after page of already viewed material. Of course, you could put the recent entries at the bottom of the page, but that just marked you as a jerk.
How did the finger program do this? Simple: it read a plain text file and printed the output onto the screen. Input->Output, the simple formula. You added new entries by editing your .plan file in a plain text editor. Simple entries, simple outputs, it didn't get any better than that. Nowadays, everyone has to have complexity, flash, and grandeur. Only a few people remember the old way and still take time to practice it. Of course, it has been webified, glitzed up just enough to make it "forward-compatible" with the new way, but the simplicity is still there. Still, I long for the days of the plaintext terminal. It was a golden time, a time before mouses, bloatware, and AOL. It was a time when Windows were something you looked through and Macintoshes were something from Washington state. People still knew what typewriters were, and music sales were recorded in numbers of vinyl albums sold, not CDs.
Of course, the servers from the days of yore couldn't handle the amount of traffic out there on the Web now, nor could they compete with the required database processing load. Innovation brings improvement, but there are some things that can't be improved upon.
Replies: 
(3)
Funny, that looks like Carlos' .plan back in 1996.
ethel.as.arizona.edu.
Posted by Carlos @ 11/19/2003 12:11 PM MST
Funny, that looks like Carlos' .plan back in 1996.
ethel.as.arizona.edu.
Posted by Carlos @ 11/19/2003 12:11 PM MST
Funny, one would have thought that would only post once.
Posted by Carlos @ 11/19/2003 12:12 PM MST
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