BFTP: Back in the day….

Here is a little blast from the past for me.

Looking through my ~/bin directory, which is a collection of some of the scripts I’ve written going back to the wee days of me playing with UNIX.

I found this script, named “findjosh”.

#!/bin/sh

joshsip=`lynx -dump http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~resch/ip.txt | head -3 | tail -1`
case $? in
0) echo “Josh’s IP Address is presently “$joshsip;;
1) echo “..There was an error…”;;
esac

I know, it’s really simple, but I must have used this script a couple of times a day.   A little explanation.  This script was written in the very early 90’s.   This time was way before Instant Messaging that we know today.  To chat with friends back then, we often utilized the UNIX “Talk” facility, and later, Windows programs that provided the same functionality.

Instead of having a directory of people, or the ability to just punch in their “handle”, to chat with a friend, you had to know their IP address.  This would be easy, but even back then, they often changed quite often.

My friend Josh, as well as other friends from their era, resorted to many methods to let people know where they were.   In the case of Josh, he published his current IP address into a text file called ip.txt.  So whether he was in his dorm room, or on one of the numerous HP or SUN workstations, this made it easier to find him rather than using the “finger” command to hundreds of UNIX workstations!

Another version of this script that I was playing with is below:

#!/bin/sh

lynx -dump http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~resch/ip.txt > ~/bin/findjosh.tmp
cat ~/bin/findjosh.tmp | head -3 | tail -1

I wasn’t surprised to find a findjosh.tmp file in my bin directory:

$ cat findjosh.tmp

Josh last logged into the following address-
144.92.181.221
F18x-xxx.net.wisc.edu (fill in the x’s yourself)
-
Last updated-
08-31-1996 21:33:29

Does anyone remember doing stuff like this to track down your friends?  What methods did you use?

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This entry was written by theunixguy, posted on December 21, 2009 at 6:49 am, and filed under BFTP and tagged .

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