The Lost Worlds of Telnet (2019)

Telehack changed my life, quite significantly.<p>I was homeschooled in a heavily locked down home. Internet was effectively not allowed, and when used, only whitelisted sites permitted. Everything was tracked.<p>Our home work&#x2F;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&#x2F;free time, and even when there was, it would usually be filled with more homework&#x2F;chores.<p>I was around 13 the time (this would be 2010), and I&#x27;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&#x27;d spend hours looking through the file system, when I discovered &quot;man&quot; and started reading the manuals for them.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t discover it.<p>Whenever I had any longer than a minute alone, I&#x27;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&#x27;s Egg being one of them), found friends and joined their &quot;ssh server&quot; (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.<p>Now I&#x27;m double the age I was then (26) and have worked full-time as a software engineer for 4 years.<p>Telehack changed how I talked with people, learned, and my entire career path. Thx &lt;3

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.<p>Ah...I wish websites were made to be more efficient. Sad.

In the early 90s there was a site that sold CDs via Telnet. You&#x27;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.<p>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.

Some are not so lost :) You can still Telnet to the Super Dimension Fortress<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System</a>

I 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.

The 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;charmbracelet&#x2F;wish">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;charmbracelet&#x2F;wish</a>

I do wonder how much of these this is simple nostalgia for the &quot;good times&quot; of my youth, vs. things actually being simpler times&#x2F;better back then.<p>Certainly brings out certain emotions seeing some of these screenshots.

The entire star wars movie over telnet ascii! I had forgotten about that!<p>Telnet helped me understand protocols like smtp better. To communicate email to a server by hand was illuminating at the time.

Telnet is still an invaluable tool to connect to memcache and redis instances for debugging and quick remote management.<p>I still chuckle when spinning up a linux instance and trying to use telnet command only to be told it&#x27;s not installed and I briefly exclaim &quot;WHAT!&quot; before I have to install it.<p>Edit: Also don&#x27;t forget Gopher, which was one of the original menu based document systems before HTTP became the &quot;norm&quot;

I&#x27;m so old I remember in the early 70&#x27;s when the ARPAnet had only a few dozen nodes, and there were free Telnet logins on most hosts -- we&#x27;d play a game (starting from HARV-10) where we&#x27;d make telnet chains to as many hosts as we could before something broke.<p>Could usually get 10-12 hosts going in a chain, sometimes more.<p>That was right before things got ugly and hosts had to shut down the well-known guest accounts due to malicious hackers.<p>Those were also the years that you&#x27;d send email by FTP&#x27;ing to a site and append-only writing to the tail of the user&#x27;s mail file.<p>Ah, lost innocence...

I 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 &quot;insecure CISCO Router&quot; 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.

There are still several Nethack servers you can use via telnet. Telnet nethack.alt.org is probably the best known one.

I don&#x27;t do a lot there but I stop by the Cave BBS now and then - telnet:&#x2F;&#x2F;cavebbs.homeip.net

I was a MUDer in the 90s. After maxing my character level I applied to be a &quot;God&quot; 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.

It 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.

Most Multiuser Dungeons still use Telnet.<p>Even though Telnet isn&#x27;t safe it can still be fun to build little text multiplayer based games and other things using it.

If you want to see some neat effects over telnet try `telnet 1984.ws`

Glory days: Telnet to 25, HELO, send fake email.

$&gt;telnet tsunami.thebigwave.net