All this is true, but back in the early 90s... we just didn't have netcat, and telnet was on every single machine, and so that's what we used as a MUD client, f

All this is true, but back in the early 90s... we just didn't have netcat, and telnet was on every single machine, and so that's what we used as a MUD client, for remote shell access, for system diagnosis to see if a port was open, for ad-hoc SMTP sessions, etc. My brain is still unfortunately wired to reach for it and I have never memorized the netcat flags in the same way.