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In my experience, telnet and FTP were used when accessing external resources; when wandering around the local menagerie of machinery, rsh, rlogin and rcp were predominant.

Telnet predates UNIX and came from the late 60s; rsh/rlogin were introduced by BSD in the 80s. So if you were in a BSD-derived system, you might have used rsh/rlogin, but otherwise telnet was the standard. Telnet was also cross-platform; I first used it on VMS.

Ditto, I had been doing sysadmin as my job for a few years in 1995 and as a component of my job or as a hobby for ~5 years before that. I was decidedly a telnet/ftp guy before ssh, and dabbled a little with "ssltelnet". I mostly avoided rsh and family because I didn't love the security model.

SSH was a fantastic improvement at the time, though the whole licensing model interfered with my use for the first several years.

My experience as well.

Much depends on whether your systems were running BSD-style RPC services.