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Comment by augusteo | Hacker News Reader

The Star Wars ASCII animation was how I learned telnet existed. Felt like discovering a secret passage in the internet.

There's something pure about text-based interfaces. No loading spinners, no JavaScript frameworks, no cookie banners. Just text.

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Wanting to know how email worked and then stumbling on it being mentioned next to the relevant RFCs was my first exposure! You could easily check pop3 mail over telnet, by sending all the commands by hand. HELO!

I then made my first email client, then an RFC later, and after browsing the web through telnet for a while, made my first web server!

Telnet was among my debugging tools for web applications.

And sending an email without line editing felt much more exciting than a dedicated mail client. Just dig the remote MX, telnet to port 25 and do it by hand. Marvelous!

I vaguely remember using telnet to debug nodes from behind load balancers. I would ssh to the load balancer ( just a freebsd box with Apache ). Then telnet from there to port 80 on one of the app servers and issue get requests (including headers) by hand to see what the loadbalancer was seeing in the responses. Very tedious, I can't remember why but i do remember a BOF literally standing behind me and forcing me to do this with telnet and not something like curl/wget.

I think I was the only one in the operations team who knew how to use telnet to check connections and existence of adresses on company and outside email servers. As well as other low level tools to diagnose problems with Windows PCs and servers. There just weren't any gui tools like that.

I have checked right now that Multi-User Dungeons we played in the 90s, still exist and are played. 35 years later!

Telnet or Mudnet client needed :)

I’ve just poked my schoolmate - he almost didn’t graduate because of MUD.

MUDding both taught me programming and pretty well wrecked my schooling, although in fairness, I didn't take college very seriously. Never finished my degree, which I now regret.

But you know TCL :)

Why do you regret it? People 40+ and juniors can't get jobs now anyways. Even with proper degrees.

These were lpmuds, so I know object-oriented C.

I know things are brutal out there, but if I find myself unemployed, I’ll need every possible edge I can find. Homelessness is decidedly suboptimal.

During the Summer of 1997, I stayed at my university and had a job at the computer lab in the basement of the library. We had four Windows 95 PCs, four Mac Quadras, and then tons of VT terminals. I specifically remember the one at the lab assistants desk being a VT-320. Anyway, it was enough for me to telnet to BatMUD. I got all the way up to level 32 or so (and made some friends!) before I stopped playing. Man, that was a great Summer. Well ... it was great until I got cheated on but that's a whole other story. :-p

EHLO! You're definitely not alone on this RFC path ;-)

sending email over telnet was part of my training as tech support for a dial-up ISP.

Back in 1991 the older students showed me how to telnet to port 25 and make my "From:" email address be anything. It was funny when the person sitting next to me received an email from satan@hell.gov

My very political grandpa definitely received a few emails from the "president", along with a few email from a "government agency" following up on the emails.

Hey. That was a gateway drug for teenage 'hackers' hehe

I remember grex.org and arbornet.org . My first free Unix shel acccounts hehe. Made friends worldwide.

Grex only shut down recently, in 2023.

I hate to be that guy, but HELO/EHLO is smtp, not pop3

I stand corrected! In my defense, it's definitely been a long while. ;)

I fixed a client’s Outlook many years ago with telnet. The app just wouldn’t download email. No error.

So, with the guy looking over my shoulder, I telnet to the email server, list his messages, and discover that there’s an email with an attachment that’s too big for Outlook to handle. Read some basic info from the message so he could confirm that deleting the message was fine - deleted the message, and Outlook worked again.

Dude was thrilled. Fun times.

I remember showing it to people on school computers circa....2008? Which was funny because nearly everything was blocked on these machines......but CMD and telnet worked fine lol. I remembered the URL by heart because of it :D

I discovered Telnet from some schlocky book [1] my parents had bought at Barnes and Noble about "Ethical Hacking" written by a guy who was later given a "Security Charlatan of the Year" award at DEF CON 20. I'd no idea it was a protocol - I thought it was just a program that let you talk directly to services like SMTP. I found netcat and friends later and thus never really got to use telnet for its intended purpose.

[1] https://archive.org/details/unofficialguidet0000fadi_r0y3/pa...

We run a copy using https://github.com/gabe565/ascii-movie, you can `nc starwars.s2.dev 23`

It's our favorite way of demoing s2.dev, https://x.com/jrdi/status/2014318511120670859

The tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com

Not many moving pictures either. It was like the literary age of the internet.

Whenever I want to go back to this era, I fire up w3m. Not everything works but things work well enough to quench my thirst

I hate this server. Every single time someone talks about Telnet mentions this site for past FIFTEEN or TWENTY YEARS as something novel.

ITs not obscure, not unknown or special - it's the most known talent site on earth.

It was made AFIR to show capabilities of ffmpg ASCII/ANSI renderer.

Real gems are SDF.ORG, TWENEX.ORG, or Cray 1 supercomputer Access, bbses and backdoors.

Ps. Telnet can be run and it is DAILY inside of the telecoms and one of few ways to speak with BSC, RNC, RRUS and individual basebands(even ultra fresh with 5G). All over IP/SEC and isolated networks. You MUST know if you are serious about computer business hehe

AUDIT people also loves it - you can record entire session of Chinese or Swedish engineer doing some new shit to basebands. This or logging entire screen

Don't think it's dead.

It was a jewel of the Internet, yes the one telnet site everyone knew (the ONE and ONLY) and I'm genuinely sad to learn it's gone--it was still there last time I tried it.

And it definitely wasn't using ffmpeg, it was bespoke hand-typed ASCII

apt-get install telnet (or whatever the package is called).

Then:

telnet SDF.org

get freeish forever Unix shell account.

For real! I just unlocked my memory of the Star Wars asciimation. Totally forgot it existed until now.

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