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▲Fun with Telnetbrandonrozek.com
61 points by Apollo1010330 9 hours ago | 21 comments
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blue1 13 minutes ago [-]
In the 90s, Book Stacks (books.com, eventually bought-and-destroyed by amazon), in addition (or before?) having a website, had a text-only online bookshop via telnet. I bought some titles that way. It was pretty cool!
t1234s 18 minutes ago [-]
The zoomable map is wild.. I didn't think you could use that level of mouse integration with telnet.
tripflag 3 hours ago [-]
I recall towel.blinkenlights.nl mentioned you would get a different version of the video (with colors) if you connected from IPv6. I've found rips online of the plain grayscale version, but not the colored one.

Anyone happen to have a recording of it?

angelofthe0dd 2 hours ago [-]
I'm old enough to remember the days of Telnet and Gopher. Back then, Telnet was key in the early "MUDs" (text-based, multiplayer games). MEAT MUD and Looney MUD were my favorites, but I honestly must have tried over 100. I sometimes wonder how much of the old "Telnet Internet" still exists from 30 years ago.
hombre_fatal 2 hours ago [-]
Having played MUDs as a preteen, I dabbled again in them a few years ago when I found some Spanish language servers. Thought it might be an interesting way to practice Spanish.

Ended up on mud.balzhur.org:5400 where I befriended a blind Venezuelan guy.

And after a while I soon realized that everyone on the server was probably blind.

Pretty fascinating.

I logged in just the other day and saw that he still plays daily. I want to talk to him again, but I need to go through the noob tutorial to remember how to do anything.

JdeBP 2 hours ago [-]
Oh that's annoying. They send LF then CR for newline on the wire, instead of CR then LF per RFC 5198.
0x445442 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure how many are from 30 years ago but...

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com

mtillman 18 minutes ago [-]
Here’s a helpful list too https://www.topmudsites.com/.
abalashov 1 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one who still thinks that telnet is a basic utility that should be installed on every system? It's a lot easier and more explicit to verify that a TCP listener is working using telnet than netcat and the like.

I know I'm living in a different and hitherto unimaginable universe when I paste modern cloud-devops sysadmin types the output of a hung telnet connection attempt to port 22, as implicit evidence that it's blocked by a firewall or whatnot, e.g.

    $ telnet 172.30.110.9 22
    Trying 172.30.110.9...
    ^C
and they say, "But it's SSH, so you can't use Telnet!"

... bro. I know it's a DeVry Cloud DevOps certificate, but...

indigodaddy 5 minutes ago [-]
It is on every system, kinda (well curl usually is):

~ $ curl -v telnet://1.1.1.1:443

* Trying 1.1.1.1:443...

* Connected to 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) port 443

--

~ $ curl -v telnet://1.1.1.1:22

* Trying 1.1.1.1:22...

^C ~ $

bawolff 54 minutes ago [-]
I dont really see how that is any different from netcat with -v option.
abalashov 46 minutes ago [-]
I will grant that it's a matter of taste and the prejudices of being O.G., but the subtle visual difference between:

   $ nc -v 172.30.110.9 22
   [literally nothing]
and:

   $ telnet 172.30.110.9 22
   Trying 172.30.110.9...
... has always struck me as significant, and pedagogically relevant.
b0a04gl 2 hours ago [-]
my older brother used to dial into local BBSes late at night, tying up the phone line and pissing off everyone. mostly forums, file sharing, a few ascii games. he showed me how to telnet into some later on when it moved online. that story about the blind MUD player reminded me some folks never left. they just kept logging in. for them it was just... daily. guess some of these old servers turned into routine for people
mingus88 1 hours ago [-]
It was social media without capitalism. Honestly, a utopia.

We logged in daily because there was always new content to discover. A new fileshare with obscure content or a zine with cool ascii art. It’s a shame that everything is fed to us now. That sense of discovery is largely gone.

It’s interesting to me how that got flipped upside down. People log on daily to consume viral content or meme templates that is in everyone’s feed. Early BBS culture was all about finding the niche where you fit in.

Shadowmist 46 minutes ago [-]
We don’t all get the same feed.
pixxel 28 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
piker 3 hours ago [-]
>telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 23

hugged to death?

infiniteregrets 2 hours ago [-]
indeed, we wanted to build an example for a quickstart to showcase "data in motion" and starwars seemed like a perfect fit, the OG had IP blocks in place which made it really difficult to use, so we thought of finding some OSS project that we could self-host and after a lot of searching we found "ascii-movie" (our patch: https://github.com/s2-streamstore/ascii-movie) and the end result was just as similar to towel.blinkenlights.nl -- https://s2.dev/docs/quickstart or simply telnet starwars.s2.dev 23

ps, it is running on fly.io so please don't melt the poor baby

JdeBP 2 hours ago [-]
Amusingly, the original that I wanted to improve upon a quarter of a century ago still works.

My improved version written in Java no longer does.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/text-movie-player.html

theblazehen 3 hours ago [-]
It's been dead for years
LightBug1 2 hours ago [-]
Surfers ... Foothills ... can't remember the rest.

Who would have known that basically the same functionality would later become a billion / trillion? dollar story (whatssap).

abalashov 1 hours ago [-]
As a former spod who started out on Surfers, I see you!

And yeah, more than a little ironic.