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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

In college, wow 23 years ago now, my school still had a Telnet interface for students to apply for spots in the classes they wanted for the following semester

It was quickly replaced by a web interface, which I promptly hacked to be able to take whatever classes I wanted with priority over everyone else, fun times

In case you are wondering, I let the admins know and they hired me to help them fix it

Still use Telnet on a regular basis to test connectivity to web servers or other services

Love connecting to port 80 and then typing:

HEAD / HTTP 1.0\n\n

It’s amazing to manually “talk” the protocol that browsers use to communicate with web servers

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During my time at RIT, 2005-2010, you could apply for classes via a web interface, but if you wanted to actually get the good spots, you'd use the telnet interface.

Specifically, you'd connect to a cluster of VMS machines (some VAXes, some Alphas) which had a text interface to the (reputedly) off-campus mainframe which did registration. I recall that "vaxa" was usually the most crowded because it was always listed first, but if you got on one of the Alpha systems it was more responsive.

Everyone insisted that you MUST use telnet, not ssh (although ssh was enabled) because having hundreds of students logged onto each VAX was enough load already without introducing cryptography. If I remember right, you could get a list of who was logged in which indicated if they came in via telnet or SSH, and people did get shamed for using SSH.

Ahh! Thanks for a trip down memory lane. RIT 98-03. Registration was intense!! ;)

Wow, I'm a sophomore at RIT currently. Feels odd seeing people who came here so long before me!

Enjoy your time there -- a lot of people complain about it but I truly loved RIT. I hope they've maintained some of the feel of the campus among all the development which has happened... I can't believe that the Riverknoll apartments are apparently still in use!

I recommend picking up a philosophy class with Dr Selinger if you've got a free elective hanging around.

PS the semester system is bullshit, quarters forever

I end up back on campus now and then, despite having graduated and moved away ten years ago - it's definitely just as interesting to see what's changed as what _hasn't_ changed.

I graduated right before the quarter-to-semester conversion happened, and heard more than my share of horror stories about lagging 10-week classes getting taught in 15, or worse, two 10-week classes smashed into a 20-week class, then taught in 15. Luckily, the writing was on the wall, so I ended up taking 32 course credits off-campus, and providing three years of pay stubs so that I could count part-time work as a co-op block, just so that I could graduate early.

I got to experience the old VAX-based system for a few years, before it was migrated to Oracle Peoplesoft in 2011 (?) - which created as many problems as it solved.

Interestingly, I'd never heard of the telnet interface to course registration before today. I did hear about the modem bank - and being the one with the old laptop (2006 vintage), got to use the modem with the campus's 5-digit dialing to get a session on it. This was, by far, more performant than trying to use the Web interface that everybody else was hitting, but interestingly it also didn't have the silly "we're closed from 6pm to 6am" stipulation.

Fellow RIT (‘08) alum. Same experience. I felt a bit advantaged being a computer-oriented chemistry major.

I was always impressed at how fast the older professors could fly through the Student Information System. Force adding you to a class could literally take a few seconds - faster that it took that clunky web frontend to load a single page sometimes.

My school assigned classes automatically, but you could dial into a serial terminal to try to change classes. Obviously all of the good classes filled up fast so I wrote an Expect script that polled each class I wanted every 15 minutes and signed up if there was room. I managed to get into every class I wanted in my Senior year despite one semester getting an initial class schedule that was blank save for one class due the school's RNG hating on me.

That is amusing, similar experience at my university in Australia, the systems got busy when it was time to submit assignments, but the one Alpha server for some reason was always quiet. Something about it scared people off?

Czech Republic, same era, but a home grown registration system (never used anywhere outside the country). The experience was exactly the same. :-D The web interface was something new and fancy at that time, but servers couldn't handle the load. Those who didn't fear Telnet got a snappy interface and could register for classes that were in high demand.

Heh-he. In the olden days of 1990, our school's computer-based registration system used DTMF/'Touch-Tone'. When the new registration season started, lots of people learned to love their redial button. So many people would be trying to call that the local phone system around the school lost the dial tone, though not service.

Don't use telnet to connect to non-telnet servers. Use nc. :)

Old habits die hard I guess ;)

Btw, had a classmate in college we called chungi (pronounced choon-ghee), we made some cool school projects together, including a videogame

Thanks for the nc recommendation

cool!

nc google.com 80

    HEAD / HTTP/1.1

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    ...

Hint: write `HEAD / HTTP/1.1` and hit twice {ENTER}

“curl -v url” saves a lot of typing while also supporting https/vhosts/etc while still showing all of the communication and other debug info.

I'm actually a little surprised that worked; one of the major differences between HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 is that all HTTP/1.1 requests MUST include a Host HTTP header, so technically a HTTP/1.1 request without such a header is malformed.

Web servers have always had to be written for the web clients that existed, not how they should have existed.

Sadly, a 100%-compliant web server (or client for that matter) would be greatly hobbled as to who it could communicate with on the real web. Although I do think the situation is far better now than it was 20 years ago.

Seconding this; during my B2B support days, this was essential, especially, since as security got a bit crazy, not all systems had telnet installed anymore and you weren't always in a position to install it.

Windows' best equivalent if it doesn't have telnet is from powershell:

Test-NetConnection -Computername [hostname or IP] -Port [some port number]

With the -Port flag, it will try to do a similar connection to a specific port.

Yeah I get a buzz from sending email on telnet... there's something about the directness of it that makes it a surprise every time it works.

It’d be nice for terminal-based applications to make a comeback :)

A lot of times they are so much faster too

I'm dating myself, but my school had touch-tone service for the same thing. My trusty war-dialing script and I didn't fail to enroll into any class I wanted either. Ahh, the good ol' days.

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