List of Telnet-accessible Systems (1997)

CDNow.com was an online retailer. The company was founded in February 1994 by twin brothers Jason Olim and Matthew Olim of Ambler, Pennsylvania. Initially launched as a Telnet service in August 1994, CDNow became a retail website in September 1994.

Aside from a variety of MUDs (see topmudsites.com for a bunch), one of my favorite Telnet destinations is HORIZONS (https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi).

> This tool provides a web-based limited interface to JPL's HORIZONS system which can be used to generate ephemerides for solar-system bodies. Full access to HORIZONS features is available via the primary telnet interface.

Wikimedia has a telnet gateway with a TOR hidden service: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway

OK, I bit the bullet, scraped all the webpages, and tried all of them in a loop.

-- None work. --

Sorry.

However, it was interesting to observe that some of the domains do still actually resolve.

--

Here's the general idea I used (I think this is all of the commands), in case anyone is curious.

  $ wget http://www.lights.ca/hytelnet/oth/oth000.html
  $ mkdir x
  $ cd x

  $ wget $(grep -o '<a href=[^>]\+' ../oth000.html |\
    sed 's,<a href=,http://www.lights.ca,' |\
    grep oth)

  $ grep '^TELNET ' * | cut -d' ' -f2 | while IFS=: read -a x; do
      echo -n "${x[0]}: ";
      dig +noall +answer A ${x[0]} | sed -n '/IN\tA/s/.*IN\tA\t//p' | tr '\n' ' ';
      echo; done | tee workingdomains.txt

  $ grep '^TELNET ' * | cut -d' ' -f2 | while IFS=: read -a x; do
      grep -q "${x[0]}: [^$]" workingdomains.txt || continue; echo "${x[0]}";
      ncat -w 5 -v ${x[0]} ${x[1]:-23}; echo ---; done

Not perfect by any means, others will likely have much simpler ideas, but it worked, I guess.

The first grep command spits out the list of working domains and may be of interest.

The command is blind to the three straight IP addresses in the HTML files, which I tested manually (also didn't work) for completeness.

Until a few years ago, a lot of freenets (like the 'AzTec' one) were still online and publicly accessible. It was always fun to roam those in search of some forgotten gems.

List needs to be amended with StarWars over telnet:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl (http://lifehacker.com/373571/watch-star-wars-in-text-via-tel...)

My favorite telnet destination, and one of the few net destinations I still visit ~5 years later, is telehack.

telnet telehack.com

I've seen it mentioned a few times on HN, but only intermittently. I know they've recently added a system to exchange files (including BASIC programs, iirc!) with other users, which is pretty cool.

SDF still provides a free shell:

ssh://new@sdf.org

https://sdf.org/

Tried 5 of them randomly picked. None worked. Guess this is more for historical value.

There's also what looks to be an Apache SSI error at the top and bottom of the page: [an error occurred while processing this directive]

I like modems. How feasible is it to run actual, real modems over IP-based network? Sampling audio at one end and playing it back on the other. We could have the old BBSs back. That would be great.

Pong and Tetris playable via Telnet

    telnet milek7.pl

telnet bbs.l0pht.com # worked in 1997!