I remember thinking it was okay to share information via fingering, and then thinking it was insane to put all that out there, and now...Facebook and Foursquare. So, cycles.

share information via fingering

I do not understand this statement. And the mental picture it is giving me is causing me to raise my eyebrows.

(i only got online in 1998 or so)

Vital Olympic news: Australia finally has more gold medals than New Zealand! >[link]

share information via fingering

'finger' was a Unix command that would give you info on the person you fingered. That info came from a file that people would set up on their network--what was that file called?

eta:

The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory.

Ah yes, I had a .plan file on some network somewhere in the past.

In Unix, you could "finger" a user, if you knew what server they had their account on. This is the first example I found:

finger skywalker@moe.cc.emory.edu

Luke Skywalker (skywalke) is not presently logged in.
Last seen at moe on Mon Jul 23 05:13:06 2001 from larry.cc.emory.edu
Mail forwarded to skywalke@mail.service.emory.edu.
Project: Save the galaxy!
Plan:
*Star-hopping Friday night with Han
*Appointment with Yoda Monday at 3:15pm

The information given would vary, but it could be a lot of detail, including when you'd last been on or read your mail, or whatever. Stalkeriffic.

I would have chosen a different name.

in 1995, my college got email, but I was very against it. My BFF figured out the password (I think that your password was your name or something-- very insecure), and she sent funny emails from other people, including a professor. They were very silly. This made me even more suspicious of this email thing!

Oh yeah, I remember dying laughing over fingering people.

We spent most of the evening talking about how, if we ended up together (we did not), there would be a story in the New York Times romance section, because who ever heard of people meeting over a computer. Insane!

That's awesome, Rick.

This was the first time I had to crack open a computer to install something, so it was very exciting.

I remember working on a bunch of computers with my dad while I was in high school. We had a few that we put together from spare parts. When I was in college, I worked with a volunteer group that took university computers that didn't work anymore and rearranged the salvageable parts into frankenputers that we used to put together a computer lab in a spare room in a church in the Ninth Ward, and taught the neighborhood kids how to use the computers. There was one kid who seemed to crashed every computer literally the moment he touched it. We were wondering if he was somehow radioactive or something.

I haven't actually physically built a computer in a while. Everything I do now is with a MacBook, and I don't know what I'm doing well enough to feel comfortable messing around with the insides of one of those.

I got online around 1995 or 1996, but only because I went to a nerd magnet school in high school.

My Nexus 7 arrived this afternoon. New toy so shiny.