Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1]
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Note that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website. ANSI escape sequences can seriously mess with your system, RCE included.
I was wondering why the Starwars one is not at the top of the list. Then I saw it no longer exists :-(
It still exists, and still works. I was sure I showed it to someone a few months ago, and just confirmed, it's still online. (I know the guy who built it).
It works over ipv4 and v6, with the ipv6 version having some additions ;)
Thanks! Admittedly I didn't check before writing my comment. It does indeed still work! Maybe one has to enable ipv6.
Doesn't work for me
My first introduction to the internet was through the telnet-based EW-too talkers like Foothills (Boston U) and Forest (UTS). I have very fond memories of staying up late talking to people from all over the globe. It was truly amazing to me.
The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.
The first BBS I used in the 80's eventually ended up with a telnet daemon but its owner passed away and I think the person that took it over eventually shut lois.org down. Domain is still registered. I can't fault them, it was an ancient system.
Very cool, some nice nostalgia looking through that list!
Missed a trick not being able to “telnet telnet.org” though. :-)
For those of you curious about what the Star Wars one looked like, the tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com
Oh man RIP towel.blinkenlights.nl 23
Anyone knows what happened with it? Maybe the creator would like to pass the torch?
Its still running just fine
Connecting to it times out for me.
traceroute:
...
15 213.136.2.6 35.049 ms 34.440 ms 34.338 ms
16 213.136.2.20 34.814 ms 33.359 ms 35.116 ms
17 213.154.229.42 33.837 ms 33.572 ms 34.794 ms
18 213.136.8.188 30.174 ms 28.810 ms 33.674 ms
tcptraceroute ... 23 :
...
15 213.136.2.6 28.626 ms 28.657 ms 28.849 ms
16 213.136.2.20 28.608 ms 28.483 ms 28.515 ms
17 213.154.229.42 27.989 ms 28.058 ms 29.336 ms
18 * * *
If you run stuff like ZeroTier or Tailscale or any other encrypted mesh or VPN you can just run telnetd and happily remote access with plain text.
Not that it buys you anything other than being retro. :)
nethack.alt.org is conspicuously absent...
It supports SSH. Since that's already in place, not much point in telnet, especially since NAO wants a password. And you prettu much have to go out of your way to install a telnet client these days.
That's a bit like connecting to IRC with netcat. It's easy to do, there's some kind of a retro hacker feel to it, but it's just not very practical.
And Slashem (his expanded sibling) and the server for Dungeon Crawl (for people which prefer action over exploration).
for years I had this in my .muttrc. it's been commented out since it stopped working...
~/work/...> telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
zsh: command not found: telnet
Search your OS repositories for something like inetutils-telnet.
May be a case of PEBKAC.
Wasted opportunity for a telnet.net or tel.net domain.
If you want a rabbit hole, this is the likely owner of both tel.net and sms.net = https://www.gbnet.net/
Also teln.et (Ethiopia)
This is insane
> doom.w-graj.net 666
> Play Doom in the terminal (code and details)
I can forsee a future when all the AI slop, popups, fake news, propaganda and ads have fully consumed the web.
Maybe then we just go back to an oldschool text based way of communicating.
No google. No socials. Just text.
That should be Gopher for websites but advertisers would find it should it become popular. Text chat via IRCD. Advertisers get banned on IRC.
Related to the last Telnet CVE?
Why talking about telnet now otherwise?
uff I hope i can list my MUD game (still in dev, though)
Say more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.
Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1]
[1] http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/internetinfo.txt
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Note that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website. ANSI escape sequences can seriously mess with your system, RCE included.
I was wondering why the Starwars one is not at the top of the list. Then I saw it no longer exists :-(
It still exists, and still works. I was sure I showed it to someone a few months ago, and just confirmed, it's still online. (I know the guy who built it). It works over ipv4 and v6, with the ipv6 version having some additions ;)
Thanks! Admittedly I didn't check before writing my comment. It does indeed still work! Maybe one has to enable ipv6.
Doesn't work for me
My first introduction to the internet was through the telnet-based EW-too talkers like Foothills (Boston U) and Forest (UTS). I have very fond memories of staying up late talking to people from all over the globe. It was truly amazing to me.
The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.
The first BBS I used in the 80's eventually ended up with a telnet daemon but its owner passed away and I think the person that took it over eventually shut lois.org down. Domain is still registered. I can't fault them, it was an ancient system.
Very cool, some nice nostalgia looking through that list!
Missed a trick not being able to “telnet telnet.org” though. :-)
For those of you curious about what the Star Wars one looked like, the tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com
Oh man RIP towel.blinkenlights.nl 23
Anyone knows what happened with it? Maybe the creator would like to pass the torch?
Its still running just fine
Connecting to it times out for me.
Ah, it must be ipv6 only now then:
t14 (2a0e:5700:xxxx) -> towel.blinkenl2026-01-27T13:33:52+0100 Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit Packets Pings Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. 2a0e:5700:xxxxxx 0.0% 4 0.8 0.9 0.8 1.2 0.2 2. 2a02:f640:xxxxxx 0.0% 4 8.5 9.3 8.4 11.0 1.2 3. 2a02:f640::1 0.0% 4 8.2 8.8 8.2 9.2 0.5 4. amsix-501.xe-0-0-0.jun1.bit-1.ne 0.0% 4 12.9 13.1 11.7 15.3 1.6 5. e48.leaf-sw2.bit-1.network.bit.n 0.0% 4 10.7 11.2 10.7 11.8 0.5 6. lo0.leaf-sw3.bit-2b.network.bit. 0.0% 4 11.8 12.0 11.8 12.3 0.3 7. 2001:7b8::213:136:2:43 0.0% 4 12.8 12.0 11.2 12.8 0.7 8. deepthought.blinkenlights.nl 0.0% 4 12.4 11.8 11.4 12.4 0.4 9. towel.blinkenlights.nl 0.0% 3 11.6 11.8 11.5 12.2 0.4 ```alternative: telehack.com
If you run stuff like ZeroTier or Tailscale or any other encrypted mesh or VPN you can just run telnetd and happily remote access with plain text.
Not that it buys you anything other than being retro. :)
nethack.alt.org is conspicuously absent...
It supports SSH. Since that's already in place, not much point in telnet, especially since NAO wants a password. And you prettu much have to go out of your way to install a telnet client these days.
That's a bit like connecting to IRC with netcat. It's easy to do, there's some kind of a retro hacker feel to it, but it's just not very practical.
And Slashem (his expanded sibling) and the server for Dungeon Crawl (for people which prefer action over exploration).
for years I had this in my .muttrc. it's been commented out since it stopped working...
#set signature="cat ~/.signature && telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 666 | tail -n3|"
Search your OS repositories for something like inetutils-telnet.
May be a case of PEBKAC.
Wasted opportunity for a telnet.net or tel.net domain.
If you want a rabbit hole, this is the likely owner of both tel.net and sms.net = https://www.gbnet.net/
Also teln.et (Ethiopia)
This is insane
> doom.w-graj.net 666
> Play Doom in the terminal (code and details)
I can forsee a future when all the AI slop, popups, fake news, propaganda and ads have fully consumed the web.
Maybe then we just go back to an oldschool text based way of communicating.
No google. No socials. Just text.
That should be Gopher for websites but advertisers would find it should it become popular. Text chat via IRCD. Advertisers get banned on IRC.
Related to the last Telnet CVE? Why talking about telnet now otherwise?
uff I hope i can list my MUD game (still in dev, though)
Say more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.