I can't recall if it was Back Orifice, or another "root kit tool" of the time, but these tools are absolutely where I first saw the allure and call of a custom

I can't recall if it was Back Orifice, or another "root kit tool" of the time, but these tools are absolutely where I first saw the allure and call of a custom telnet shell. I remember telnet-ing into the control port and aggressively open/closing the CD-ROM drive on my brother in the other room (among other pranks). Something about telnet-ing into a service gives that Great Hacker Feel. You're at a command line! But it's not bash, or cmd.exe, it's something specific to that rootkit. There's little easter eggs. Some common escape codes might work, they might not. The prompt changes as you use it. These days, I don't get many opportunities, but if I can add a very simple line-oriented protocol to a side project I sure will.