Carmack's .plan Files

1994

Date: 1994 to 2000 · Place: id Software, Mesquite, Texas, via finger protocol · Figures: John Carmack, programmer, id Software · finger daemon, RFC 1288 · Tags: Finger, Dev Log, id Software 01. Finger johnc@idsoftware.com The finger protocol, RFC 1288, lets anyone on the internet type finger user@host and read that user's .plan file, a plain text file in their home directory. It is designed in the 1970s for telling colleagues where you went for lunch. John Carmack, lead programmer of Doom and Quake, uses it from 1994 onward as a public engineering diary. Carmack posts terse notes about renderer bugs, BSP tree optimizations, network protocol redesigns, and the occasional Ferrari acquisition. Fans mirror the .plan to Usenet within minutes of each update. 02. The First Dev Blog Carmack's .plan invents the public engineering postmortem as a genre. Quake's deathmatch netcode, the abandonment of the original Trinity engine, the decision to GPL Doom in 1999, all are announced first via finger. The format is read-only, no comments, no replies, a one-way broadcast from the workstation of the most influential graphics programmer alive. Blogs absorb the practice by 1999. By 2010 every studio has a dev blog. Carmack stops updating the .plan when he leaves id in 2013, but the archive at floodyberry.com preserves every entry. "I do most of my best programming work at four in the morning, fueled by Diet Coke and the knowledge that nobody is going to interrupt me." — John Carmack, .plan file, 1996 Sources • John Carmack .plan archive, mirrored at floodyberry.com • David Kushner, 'Masters of Doom' (Random House, 2003) • RFC 1288, 'The Finger User Information Protocol' (December 1991)