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The Lost Worlds of Telnet (2019)
- cancerhacker 3y agoIt was fun exploring telehack and “visiting” systems where people of worked with decades ago were still logged in... but I still use telnet today to poke at ports, or when I can’t remember curl syntax.
- maxcoder4 3y agoFor simple poking at ports I think netcat is more common today. Especially for simple debugging and doing requests by hand.
- kqr 3y agoI don't know about more common, but certainly more appropriate. Netcat is made for sending and receiving bytes (or datagrams with the right flag). Telnet is made for speaking the telnet protocol. The only reason some people use telnet for other things is that most other protocols have control sequences that happen to have no effect on a telnet connection.
- Pinus 3y agoI seem to remember that at least some TELNET clients would default to "dumb byte pipe" mode if run on some other port than 23. However, I can't find anything supporting this memory, so quite possibly I'm wrong...
- teddyh 3y agoFrom inetutils-telnet(1): “When connecting to a non-standard port, telnet omits any automatic initiation of TELNET options.” <https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/inetutils-telnet/inetutils-telnet.1.en.html https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/inetutils-telnet/inetut...> From the manual of the old Linux NetKit telnet: “When connecting to ports other than the telnet port, telnet does not attempt telnet protocol negotiations.”
- sethammons 3y agoThe entire star wars movie over telnet ascii! I had forgotten about that! Telnet helped me understand protocols like smtp better. To communicate email to a server by hand was illuminating at the time.
- seba_dos1 3y agoIt's not the entire movie. It's about 20 minutes long.
- actionfromafar 3y agoAlso it's only in black and white.
- seba_dos1 3y agoThe difference is in the visitors.
- wiz21c 3y agoNot B&W, just dark and light.
- brabarossa 3y agoProfessionally 'B&W' is used to describe two-color image, and 'grayscale' to what colloquially known as 'B&W'.
- wiz21c 3y agoI was referring to the dark and light side of the force :-)
- nosrepa 3y agoAnd it ends in a rick-roll.
- n1b0m 3y ago
- CalRobert 3y agoI don't do a lot there but I stop by the Cave BBS now and then - telnet://cavebbs.homeip.net
- rgmerk 3y agoI read this and my overwhelming reaction is nostalgia for an era when you could expose a server to the internet without having to build 20 layers of defence against the worst people in the world trying to misuse it for all sorts of awful crap.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoMy public library system used to have their catalogue on telnet. I liked it a lot because it was a simple, direct interface where you could look stuff up. Now decades later, I bring up the site and see it loads 120kb of fonts, or more than the entire data sent and received by a typical telnet session. Ah...I wish websites were made to be more efficient. Sad.
- gargs 3y agoThis was my immediate thought upon seeing the title! I used to love the library telnet server, which worked for searching, placing a hold, renewing, and even inter-library loans. There was also rudimentary full-text search of engineering journals. Today, it's a 'modern' website with tons of whitespace, non-customizable fonts, and links out to events and what not. Simplicity is such a wonderful feature and yet it's somehow completely orthogonal to modern engineering.
- rconti 3y agoMy public library system allowed you to telnet in, and had a limited menu-based list of destinations you could telnet OUT to... but a simple escape char allowed you an open telnet prompt to go anywhere in the world. It was my favorite (only) pivot point back in the day before I knew that term. (95-97 I'd guess).
- moffkalast 3y agoTo be fair, at the time dial up was what, 56 kbps? 120 kB would take 17 seconds to transfer over that. If taken percentually relative to the available bandwidth, most modern sites still come out far ahead I think. At 100 Mbps you'd be able to download over 200 MB in that time.
- lagniappe 3y agoSome are not so lost :) You can still Telnet to the Super Dimension Fortress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
- phil21 3y agoI do wonder how much of these this is simple nostalgia for the "good times" of my youth, vs. things actually being simpler times/better back then. Certainly brings out certain emotions seeing some of these screenshots.
- browningstreet 3y agoSubcultures feel special. Stadiums, less so.
- mountain_peak 3y agoWell said. I've likened technical hobbies to Joel trying to hide memories of Clementine deeper and deeper in the recesses of his mind - away from Lacuna's eraser. Somehow when what hobbyists love to do becomes "for the masses", it becomes less interesting, which means digging deeper for hobbies that are largely shielded from the public. I think that's partially where innovation comes from.
- digitalsushi 3y agoi'm 44 because i think the specific years i was a kid have specific context. like many, many of us here but not all or even most. in the 80s, tools were toy quality. phone systems, cable boxes, internet protocols, all of these things were invented without concern of their abuse. people were able to play with them. they invented future careers out of tinkering. and they invented their own playthings in the meanwhile. think of this measurement - the ability to completely devour a random magazine: back in those days, we were not overstimulated by data. we could re-read a magazine, and all of it's ads, editorials, literally all of it - because we were starved for material. think of the deep thoughts, the creative expanse, the opportunity to sit quietly and imagine something new, when we had those pre-historic days of mass media. i believe nostalgia is dangerous to experience but maybe that's because i agree simpler times made for easier toys and easier toys made for more creative childhood. i would not re-roll my childhood experience but i also come from tremendous luck and opportunity, getting to play with computers, tromp around unsupervised in the woods on a bmx bike, and deliver news papers as an 8 year old to half the town through my teens.
- Suzuran 3y agoI used to keep a Twenex instance on the public internet (before SDF had theirs) but vulnerability scanning bots essentially DDoSed it to death, plus I got tired of some robot that kept emailing my NOC contacts about the "insecure CISCO Router" that they needed to immediately shut down. We could never get in contact with whoever was running the thing and attempts to firewall it failed because it would change IP addresses.
- drtournier 3y ago$>telnet tsunami.thebigwave.net
- allknowingfrog 3y agoThe Wish library for Go tries to provide a similar experience for the modern world (using SSH). It may be worth a look for anyone feeling nostalgic about the decline of telnet. https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish
- jghn 3y agoIn the early 90s there was a site that sold CDs via Telnet. You'd telnet in, navigate their menu to select your CDs, and then check out. You know, give it your credit card number over Telnet as one does. Their selection was awesome compared to the standard stores of the day. I believe it was called cdconnection.com, and then it was replaced with a more recognizable to modern eyes web based store by the mid-90s.
- raytopia 3y agoThat's auper interesting I wonder how much e-commerce happened over telnet before the world wide web took off. Reading this though makes me want to try and build a website that uses Telnet. As an aside I've always wondered if someone has tried building something like stripe but you can check out in your terminal.
- jghn 3y agoAnother one I remember was a copycat of the one I mentioned before, but specifically focused on importing CDs to the US. I remember that one because if I couldn't find one on the main site, I'd go there. I'm sure there were others, but can't remember if I was aware of any of them. It seems absolutely bonkers now to do those kinds of transactions over telnet, but it was the early 90s so hey.
- blantonl 3y agoTelnet is still an invaluable tool to connect to memcache and redis instances for debugging and quick remote management. I still chuckle when spinning up a linux instance and trying to use telnet command only to be told it's not installed and I briefly exclaim "WHAT!" before I have to install it. Edit: Also don't forget Gopher, which was one of the original menu based document systems before HTTP became the "norm"
- musictubes 3y agoThere are still several Nethack servers you can use via telnet. Telnet nethack.alt.org is probably the best known one.
- tronium 3y agoTelehack changed my life, quite significantly. I was homeschooled in a heavily locked down home. Internet was effectively not allowed, and when used, only whitelisted sites permitted. Everything was tracked. Our home work/life was strenuous. Both parents holding advanced degrees and living on a hobby farm led to ~10h a day of homework, and another ~3-4h per day of taking care of the place. Very little room for socializing/free time, and even when there was, it would usually be filled with more homework/chores. I was around 13 the time (this would be 2010), and I'd discovered the Terminal app on the Macs we used. Toying around with it when nobody was in the room had led to some discoveries. I'd spend hours looking through the file system, when I discovered "man" and started reading the manuals for them. This led me down the rabbit hole of learning everything I could about the world inside the command prompt, and even opening up telnet ports on other macs throughout the house and connecting to them. Eventually, (and unfortunately I cannot remember how), I discovered that I could connect to Telehack, a BBS with real other people on it, and our internet tracking software didn't discover it. Whenever I had any longer than a minute alone, I'd connect and talk with the people there. I learned things about the old internet, got sent places I could FTP to download books (The Cuckoo's Egg being one of them), found friends and joined their "ssh server" (where we set up custom ways of more live-chat), and I learned basic programming in Bash, Python, Ruby, and other languages. I always had to disconnect (Apple+Q) as soon as I heard footsteps. Now I'm double the age I was then (26) and have worked full-time as a software engineer for 4 years. Telehack changed how I talked with people, learned, and my entire career path. Thx <3
- aeonik 3y agoHow did you figure out how to navigate the filesystem in the first place? Or use the terminal app to get to the man pages? I remember opening up my first IDE when I was about 14 and becoming overwhelmed with my complete lack of knowledge about coding. Looking at the blank text file was like staring into a bottomless pit of nothingness. I learned how to read from the terminal though, so I knew commands like `cd` and `dir` before I even knew how to read. I'm unsure how someone just figures out the terminal without a guide.
- phatskat 3y ago
- raytopia 3y agoMost Multiuser Dungeons still use Telnet. Even though Telnet isn't safe it can still be fun to build little text multiplayer based games and other things using it.
- nhggfu 3y agoGlory days: Telnet to 25, HELO, send fake email.
- imzadi 3y agoI was a MUDer in the 90s. After maxing my character level I applied to be a "God" with no idea what that actually meant. Turned out, I was signing up to be a MUD programmer. It was awesome. I did all my coding via a telnet connection using ED.
- cpr 3y agoI'm so old I remember in the early 70's when the ARPAnet had only a few dozen nodes, and there were free Telnet logins on most hosts -- we'd play a game (starting from HARV-10) where we'd make telnet chains to as many hosts as we could before something broke. Could usually get 10-12 hosts going in a chain, sometimes more. That was right before things got ugly and hosts had to shut down the well-known guest accounts due to malicious hackers. Those were also the years that you'd send email by FTP'ing to a site and append-only writing to the tail of the user's mail file. Ah, lost innocence...
- zoidb 3y agoIf you want to see some neat effects over telnet try `telnet 1984.ws`