Yes, the Columbia VMS version of finger was written by the system manager of the Chemistry VAX/780, creatively named "CUCHEM::" I think I remember it being written in Fortran, but I don't remember why he did it that way. One assumes it was because he didn't know either Macro-32 or Bliss. I forget his name (I'll probably remember it after I hit send...) We had already been running finger servers on DECnet on our 20's for some time. Sure wish I could find that code.

Finger on a Tops-20 cluster needed no changes as they had DECnet running over the CI. So, you could finger the entire cluster, which was impressive for the time: something between 200 to 300 users. There was a new JSYS called INFO% that they created for cluster support, that would enable you get certain kinds of information via a GETAB% executed on the target machine.

If you are handing Tops-20 Finger an RFC822 address, then I believe it will do forwarding for you. We put that in for systems that were still at 4.x.

On 9/14/24 4:12 PM, Terri Kennedy wrote:

So, that was all before I started work on it. So the current VMS Finger is probably a later version of the one maintained at PSU.

On 2024-09-14 14:49, Dan Cross wrote:
I'm not sure about this part; as I understood it, Bryan wrote Penn State finger from scratch. I find a version of it online: https://www.digiater.com/openvms/freeware/v40/finger/psfinger/
But it seems that it's getting hard to come by. On my Alpha, I found version 1.5, but I can't find that online (at least not in my cursory search). I'm happy to upload that somewhere if anyone would like.

On Fri, Sep 13, 2024 at 6:33 PM Terri Kennedy <terri-hecnet@glaver.org> wrote:

The aaareadme.txt file there says:

| DECUS FINGER DIFFERENCES
| ========================
| This is a list of things I can think of which differ.
|
|    /HELP to the server is the only documentation.   This is a munged copy of the DECUS Finger help file. I haven't given documentation any serious consideration yet.
|
|    This is a clusterwide finger (/CLUSTER is default).
|
|    New mail message headers are never listed (I haven't yet figured out how to match addresses so it only displays messages from the person doing the Finger).
|
|    There is no Finger database. Names are read from the SYSUAF owner field. The entire SYSUAF is read at startup, and updated as needed for new accounts. There is not presently an easy way to disable printing the owner name.
|
|    Added fields for account and nodename.
|
|    No support for /SYSTEM, /IDLETIME, /TTTYPE, or /SWAPPED.
|
|    /SORT only supports account, CPU time, Login time, and Username (Username is the default).
|
|    Differs a bit in what an interactive process is.
|
|    Only supports one filename for finger plan (default FINGER.PLN). Also prints a project line (FINGER.PROJECT).
|
|    The format of the process listing (which fields can be displayed, which columns, and how wide the fields are) can be easily configured
|    at assembly time.
|
|    No support for Jnet, or TCP other then UCX/Multinet, at this time.
|
|    The server will not forward Finger requests. Commands like Finger @watsun@cunixc are not valid.

So it seems that there was some contributions from one to the other (before my maintainership).

The PSU one is in Macro-32. That's the sign of someone who REALLY likes Macro-32. DEC folks would probably have used Bliss-32. The Columbia one (which turned into DECUS Finger) is written almost entirely in Fortran, probably because Fortran was the only sensible cross-architecture language of the era (while I'm pretty sure one could write a Finger implementation in COBOL or RPG II, I don't envy the life of anyone who would try it 8-).

I'm not sure what the state of cluster support is in DECUS Finger - by the time I released 5.1.35 I only had a single Alpha node. I'll have to see how it is on a cluster and add that support if not present for V52.2.
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