The book Masters of Doom is a good read if you're interested in the backstory here.

This was very cool to read after having read this book, but never actually read the .plan files before. Kind of an "aha" moment.

It's from his public .plan file, I think, not an internal message to staff but the public announcement. Carmack just didn't do 'our incredible journey'

That's correct. One could think of it as a blog post.

I remember typing "finger johnc@idsoftware.com" every couple of days.

I actually tried this. It doesn't work. id still seem to be running fingerd though...

See if it'll return anything if you ask for all online users? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1288#section-2.5.1

or just reading his .plan on shugashack.

Could people outside their internal computer system read his .plan file?

Yes, they ran a public finger server (which was then scraped and put on the web by third-parties).

It takes a special state of mind to run around telling stories about being hired by US military while 8 years old to hack on nuclear launch computers (script to War Games), which is what Brenda Romero repeats in interviews about her husband.

And what's telling is that Carmack follows it up with a long, grandiose statement about his future project; making him appear somewhat dishonest.

He specifically makes no promises. QuakeWorld was released, more or less as described just five months later in December 1996.

Well, the master server idea kinda died (partly for technical reasons, i.e. authentication was hard, and the server kept dropping because of unreliable networks, and partly because people stopped wanting to play, afraid every game would drop their score) , so it wound up just being a better Quake network client. But that was still pretty revolutionary.

The master (meta) server sort of happened, it was just GameSpy. Global scoring and stat keeping didn't but then there was NetGames USA a bit later although it always seemed a bit pointless to me for FPS games.

Yep, I was a GameSpy beta tester. There was a partnership of sorts that ended up forming sometime in 1996. We ended up taking part in a couple of QuakeWorld beta tests later that year. I remember how the networking code was remarkably better, even on a dialup connection with 200-300ms pings.

Eh. I think it's more interesting that this predicted and explained an intent to implement pretty much everything that modern gaming services like Steam provide. Save voice chat and achievements, obviously.