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My 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 d

My 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 ago
This 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 ago
My 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).
- icedchai 3y ago
  This was very common with public libraries, I think. It was the same around here, around 1993 - 1996. Security in the earlier days of the Internet was pretty loose.
- louky 3y ago
  Same here, it was a great day discovering that back in the early 90s
moffkalast 3y ago
To 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.