Thinking about telnet & social media, I do remember that brief moment in time when the majority of my college's students had internet access but the web hadn't been invented yet. Telnet (along with talk, finger .plan's, newsgroups) had its moment in the sun. Enough so that I had a professor who would joke with us about getting our papers done before we'd hit telnet.
And thinking about MUDs, there is no better / worse way to feel the crush of time than finding your old MUD is still online. I found mine again a few years ago. Couldn't remember my password so made a new char. Used "finger" to look at my main. Last logged in 9000+ days ago. Looked up my friends who I used to spend hours with. Around the same. 9000+ days. Seeing it quantified in days rather than years made it more difficult and more personal. 9,000 days just gone like that.
shmoe 14 minutes ago [-]
RIP TDome ][!
A local MajorBBS in my area had multiple nodes and outbound internet.. with no dns for some reason. So we needed to know the ip address of the bbs/mud we wanted to telnet to.
Some of the highest quality people I know I met there and still speak to.
JohnMakin 27 minutes ago [-]
Had a pretty neglectful childhood, in my early adolescence to pass the time locked in my room I was gifted by a dead grandma's estate an ancient 80's IBM PC that had some network capability and could telnet that no one else could figure out how to use so it was put in my room. I ended up somehow figuring out via stuff I'd read in the school library and a web search on the school computer that I could telnet to chat rooms. I don't remember much of it, and a lot of it looking back was probably fairly creepy/inappropriate for a 12-14 year old, but I think just being able to log on to this device when I was forcefully isolated and talk to complete strangers to pass the time really helped me in a way that diving into books I'd read a thousand times couldn't.
I wish I'd done something better with that time other than just chatrooms but c'est la vie.
angelofthe0dd 4 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 4 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 3 hours ago [-]
Oh that's annoying. They send LF then CR for newline on the wire, instead of CR then LF per RFC 5198.
mfontani 55 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately many older mud servers (diku? Rom?) started with the wrong \\n\\r and codebases spawned from them just continued.
Very few send the proper \\r\\n
anthk 46 minutes ago [-]
There are some clients which are just packed up libre MUD clients with sound and music triggered on actions/words.
Yes, there are tons of blind people playing them, altough several of them prefer either text adventures, fighting games or adapted pokémon for emulators.
giraffe_lady 1 hours ago [-]
I suspect all the active muds remaining have significant blind cohorts. The one I play has at least a dozen blind or severely vision impaired users, which is very disproportionate in a population of only a few hundred.
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?
Pwntastic 5 minutes ago [-]
I just tried and it looks like it's still just in grayscale.
It does give a message stating as such:
Well, the IPv6 version is exactly the same as the IPv4 one.
The difference is in the visitors...
Je bent een Stoere Bikkel, aka You Rock.
abalashov 3 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.
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 2 hours 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
~ $
abalashov 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't know curl could do that. Something new every day... thanks!
Having said that, in the world of my customers' systems, neither telnet nor curl can be presumed, it seems.
indigodaddy 35 minutes ago [-]
Me either until a few years ago. My mind was well blown!
bawolff 3 hours ago [-]
I dont really see how that is any different from netcat with -v option.
abalashov 2 hours 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.
NoSalt 1 hours ago [-]
Did you seriously just say "hitherto unimaginable"?
abalashov 1 hours ago [-]
I did. In the century I come from, Telnet would never be confused for SSH.
t1234s 2 hours ago [-]
The zoomable map is wild.. I didn't think you could use that level of mouse integration with telnet.
justusthane 2 hours ago [-]
Mouse movement in the terminal is signalled by ANSI escape codes, which are just characters sent along with everything else and interpreted by the remote program, so it really has nothing to do with Telnet.
Incredibly cool to see that in action though! That map is incredible.
NoSalt 1 hours ago [-]
I love the map ... it is glorious!
blue1 2 hours 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!
b0a04gl 3 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
anthk 44 minutes ago [-]
MUDs once predated IRC, and some MUDs were just talking places. Check Lambda Moo.
mingus88 3 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 2 hours ago [-]
We don’t all get the same feed.
pixxel 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
piker 5 hours ago [-]
>telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 23
hugged to death?
infiniteregrets 4 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 4 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.
And thinking about MUDs, there is no better / worse way to feel the crush of time than finding your old MUD is still online. I found mine again a few years ago. Couldn't remember my password so made a new char. Used "finger" to look at my main. Last logged in 9000+ days ago. Looked up my friends who I used to spend hours with. Around the same. 9000+ days. Seeing it quantified in days rather than years made it more difficult and more personal. 9,000 days just gone like that.
A local MajorBBS in my area had multiple nodes and outbound internet.. with no dns for some reason. So we needed to know the ip address of the bbs/mud we wanted to telnet to.
Some of the highest quality people I know I met there and still speak to.
I wish I'd done something better with that time other than just chatrooms but c'est la vie.
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.
Yes, there are tons of blind people playing them, altough several of them prefer either text adventures, fighting games or adapted pokémon for emulators.
https://www.telnetbbsguide.com
Anyone happen to have a recording of it?
It does give a message stating as such:
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.
and they say, "But it's SSH, so you can't use Telnet!"... bro. I know it's a DeVry Cloud DevOps certificate, but...
~ $ 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 ~ $
Having said that, in the world of my customers' systems, neither telnet nor curl can be presumed, it seems.
Incredibly cool to see that in action though! That map is incredible.
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.
hugged to death?
ps, it is running on fly.io so please don't melt the poor baby
My improved version written in Java no longer does.
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/text-movie-player.html
Who would have known that basically the same functionality would later become a billion / trillion? dollar story (whatssap).
And yeah, more than a little ironic.