Telix clone | Hacker News Reader

Telix clone

ath0.net

50 pointssysoleg54 comments

Well, as good a time as any to remember an old exploit.

Back in the old days, to put the modem back in command mode, you had to send it +++ and wait one second without sending anything.

Hayes, a modem manufacturer, owned a patent on this "and wait one second" idea. Some manufacturers had to implement this idea without that one second.

Then came the Internet, and with it the ICMP protocol, which is a neat way to make a remote connection repeat stuff back to you. And lo and behold, you could send a ICMP packet with data that contained "+++ATH0" and when echoing back the packet your modem would pick it up as a command and disconnect. Same goes for IRC /ctcp ping commands, and many other protocols.

You might enjoy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18664979 .

My first computer was a 386 SX, which came with a modem, but I didn't know what that was at the time. I was 12 or so, and didn't know computers could talk to each other over the phone line. I discovered Telix while dorking around in DOS, but it made no sense to me.

Some time later, I was talking to the guy at Radio Shack (!) and I mentioned this mysterious program. He knowingly nodded, said "plug one end of this cord into your wall jack, the other into the back of your PC, then type the following command..."

Cut to a year later, I'm running a BBS out of my bedroom, learning to write door games, and scripting for MUDs. I can draw a pretty straight line between Telix and my future career (even though Terminate was cooler).

I saw the title and thought, "This is probably some other product named Telix, not the one I know about." And then I clicked on the link and it all came back to me. So. many. hours. using Telix back in the day.

I eventually switched from Telix to Telemate because of its limited multitasking. I LOVED the BBS scene. Good times. Good times.

Can't remember which, but I think Telemate also had programmable macros that I used to jump in and out of hyperspace in one of the multiplayer door games..

Back in India, we had a (somewhat cheap) shell internet plan offered for students. You dial into a phone number that dropped you in a ISP shell from where you could use lynx or email. The problem was that our state-owned phone provider had a "courtesy" beep every 3 minutes to let us know we're being charged another unit, which would cause the modem to hang up.

I remember setting up Telix to record the session, log into my Hotmail, open each email and scroll all the way down all in 3 minutes, and then read the emails from the session log.

atdt8675309

In the 90s, my modem terminal of choice was Terminate. It's still available! http://www.terminate.com

I used telix until I was able to download Terminate. Nostalgia overload going on over here. Do you remember HS/Link? Being able to chat with the sysop while downloading blew my mind at the time.

Nice, I will check this out on my Tandy 1000HX BBS machine. I haven't found an ideal terminal program for that config. I actually thought you typed "Terminus," which is the terminal program I used on the Amiga 1200 back in '92. Today, I use Radigan's predecessor to Terminus, JR-Comm on the Amiga 1000, which is the system I use most frequently for BBSing.

Some of these systems can be seen on my BBSing page: https://bytecellar.com/bbsing/

Yes! I remember JRComm! I used that up until 1994, on my A500 then A3000. Not sure why I never bothered to upgrade to Terminus.

For me, Freeze Dried Terminal for the ST.

I hear lots of good about that term. I use the interesting, "16-color" TAZ when I bring out the 520ST for BBSing these days. :-)

https://bytecellar.com/2017/06/18/four-colors-into-sixteen-t...

oh look at fancy you with touch-tone service.

ATDP8675,309

(by the way, "," works on iphones)

I use it to automatically get a human on support lines.

Hey guys, this is Colin, the author of Telix. A friend of mine sent me a link to this thread.

I just wanted to send a shoutout to everybody here. It's pretty cool and gratifying after all these years to see people still remembering and talking about Telix!

Thank you for all the memories !!

Minicom which is available for most posix systems including Linux and macOS is modeled on Telix.

My personal favorite DOS terminal program was Commo. It was totally customizable using macros. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commo

I used the heck out of Minicom when I finally made Linux my "daily driver" back in the early 90s.

When I finally did get dialup Internet service I ended up using "dip"[1] to script the logon to the ISP's terminal server (a Xyplex, if I remember correctly). I remember that the terminal server answered for finger and showed you the usernames of the logged-on users, their logon and idle time, and their serial port numbers. I remember complaining to the ISP when I was getting busy signals dialing into the modem pool and, when I finally did get on, seeing users logged-on two or three times with multi-hour idle times.

[1] http://ibiblio.org/gferg/ldp/man/man8/dip.8.html

The good old days.. I remember using dip! I helped to build a few ISPs. We used Xylogic Annex terminal servers at one place. The second ISP used USR digital modems (I forget what they were called?) By the time I set up the third one, we'd outsourced all dialup to a third party network.

I knew a guy who ran a small ISP in the Dayton, OH area. He went from having banks of external modems on POTS lines connected to multi-port serial cards attached to a Windows NT Server 3.51 machine to an Ascend router with a PRI and "digital modems" (CODECs in DSPs, no doubt) to finally using an outsourced dial provider, all in the space of about 18 - 24 months. I wish I'd been a little older and a little more business savvy at the time. It was clearly a wild time, and was probably lots of fun.

I remember working in the "server room" of one of the early ISPs. There were about 100 individual phone lines coming off the wall, each going into a modem. It was like a river of phone cable. Each modem also had its own serial cable and power brick, too, of course. The bricks were pretty large, so there were power strips chained 3 layers deep. It felt about 100 degrees in there (no AC or cooling of any kind.) Thinking about it now, I'm surprised the whole place didn't melt down.

I used to deploy Xylogics Annex terminal servers in hospitals to connect bar code scanners via LAT to DEC Alpha servers running OpenVMS. I never deployed them for dialup access but I did deploy Shiva LanRover devices to a few ISPs and enterprise customers for dialup.

I loved the BBS era. Commo by Fred Brucker was my modem progam of choice. Hook in Zmodem for downloads and you had a hot setup.

[38,38,40,40,37,39,37,39,66,65].forEach(key => document.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent("keydown", {keyCode: key})))

I miss the BBS days... sometimes.

I used to use JRComm on the Amiga. Before that, it was Apple Access II on an Apple IIc.

A friend of mine hosted a BBS on an Amiga in the early 90s. I was amazed by the machine's multitasking. He could actually use his computer while simultaneously hosting the BBS. (Eventually I think I got DESQview for my PC and could pull off a kinda-sorta approximation.)

The BBS software he ran was Dungeons and Dragons themed, and as I recall it mixed exploring and combat along with the mundane BBS activities-- messages, downloads, etc. I think that your experience points in the game-side ended up translating to BBS-side privileges, too. I should do some searching to see if I can dig up some details. It was unique across the various BBS's I called.

Yes, I also ran a BBS from my Amiga! I wrote it myself in C when I was a teen. The Amiga was amazing for the time, and learning about the OS was so much fun. I still play around with emulators now and then to take me back to that time.

I recently found a bunch of Procomm Plus logs where I had typed back and forth with some local friends.

alt-z for help

Cries in MacOS

It doesn't seem to work under Linux either. I also tried Alt-W in case my AZERTY keyboard layout would be the problem, but it doesn't do anything either.

Yeah, doesn't work for me on Linux + Firefox + a US QWERTY keyboard, either.

In some regions, the option key on Mac keyboards is labeled as "alt". E.g. https://www.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3504584/Mac-Keyb...

If you press Alt+Z on the Mac, you get this: Ω. Fn doesn't override it either.

What happens if you pick Unicode Hex Input from System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Input sources?

Remember Telix played C-E-G on the PC speaker when it connected?

I don't know but if you go into the input box and type on your keyboard...

UUDDLRLRBA

It pops up a cute little rainbow

cornify.js [0], appropriate :).

[0] https://www.cornify.com/js/cornify.js

Hold down Return after typing it for a very blinged-out window!

Does anyone remember RoboComms to get mail off FidoNet?

what is this?

The Telix terminal interface. I spent so, so much time on it in the 80s, discovering BBSes, other people and later exploring the worldwide X25 network.

Also, from the page's source code:

// UUDDLRLRBA! var kkeys = [], konami = "38,38,40,40,37,39,37,39,66,65";

I have a hard time finding information about Telix. How did this work, e.g. how would one "discover" other people?

I think Telix was just one popular modem program of many.

Just Google for "BBS" i.e. bulletin board system.

They worked over phone lines. Normally you would know about one BBS from a computer magazine and then that BBS would have a megalist of other ones on it.

Telix[0] was just a terminal emulator, to find dial up systems you generally got information offline, such as via magazines or friends, and then got to know other systems from there, or from lists like the FidoNet node list.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telix

Usually you'd find one BBS through word of mouth, and that one would have listings of systems which were hopefully a local number.

There usually had just the one line so users were limited to a certain number of minutes a day before they were no longer permitted to sign on. Sometimes a shareware game or new "Demo" would make to to a BBS and it might take you a week or two to download the entire thing because of time limits.

Some systems gave you extra time if you uploaded new content to encourage sharing. It was kind of a neat system, and I miss how small it was.

You would come upon a ZIP file and alongside its primary payload there would be one or more ads for various BBSes.

Sometimes the ads were the payload: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art#Scene

I am immediately reminded of "0208057040540" and "26245400080177". Those were, indeed, the days.

Oh, I remember QSD and Lutzifer! I was on there probably '90 to '91-ish?

Same time frame for me. I'd heard of the Internet (by way of "The Cuckoo's Egg" and coverage of the Morris worm) but being out in the boondocks with no college close by there wasn't any chance of getting Internet access at that time. The X.25 networks, and just the idea of always-on networked computers, were breathtaking to me.

Oh, I loved that book! Maybe I'll re-read it...

I found my way into some x.25-to-internet gateways in the early 90's. Most corporate networks were very insecure then. Some of those gateways had no authentication: you'd connect in over x25, then telnet out. The local colleges were also pretty bad.

026245890040004 :-) Altger. Still remember it by heart. The brain is a strange machine.

and I recognized QSD immediately when I saw it in your post.

ha that's some fantastic nostalgia

but ATV and ATI commands not working to my disappointment

whoa that takes me back.

I clicked expecting an open source clone that I could run on the same hardware.

How disappointing.

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