Those of us who were alive across both those times, 80s and 90s are not just interchangeable symbols denoting "before my time".

      finger sdf.org

      finger london@graph.no

30 years later, I still recall the time I had to calm down an angry customer after a frontline support tech told her that he was going to "finger her to find out what the problem is." He _really_ didn't think that one through!

In other news, I was born too young to use finger, but I definitely used Hyper terminal on Windows which had a chat like console app that worked with it. (I think it's called CHAT.EXE; I wonder if Windows still includes it in their production images.)

I also still use w to see who's logged into stuff (useless on containers...but sometimes useful!) and the type command to print out definitions of functions from the absolute disaster that are my dotfiles (someday I'll clean them up!)

In ye olden days, computers were more often multiuser, shared, and expensive servers. The computer lab at my university contained a pool of SGI, AIX, HP-UX, Sun SPARC, Linux, and SCO (but no IBM) boxes available over ssh via round-robin dns. The intent was to teach portable software engineering rather than tying things to a particular, proprietary platform. The trend towards so-called "hermetic toolchains" is absurd, anti-tinkering, anti-standards, and anti-portability depending on concealed, opaque binary blobs. Don't even get me started about bazel or systemd.