Well, the brainchild of YC Founder Robert Morris, the Morris Worm, exploited a zero-day in fingerd, so yes, after 1988, fingerd was extremely important for network security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

I'm not sure a hard copy would have particularly helped

FINGER IS VERY IMPORTANT!

ah my bad :D. i wasnt talkin about bank transactions but yeah :p not finger logs either haha.