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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 [email protected]
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.
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.
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
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
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
My favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise...
People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever
Ah, so this is why I suddenly got a bunch of email.
Hey all, site owner here. Thanks for the visits and all the fun stories! I really miss this era of computing. Feel free to let me know if you have something that should be added to the site.
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 ;)
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]
Back in a time when you had to pay out the nose for long distance calling, you had outdial service through X.25 PSN or more often, as ARPANet turned into Internet, you had Telnet accessible outdials.
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 * * *
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.
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.
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.
This makes me think of the historical hxxp://simtel.net/ domain (now web spam, whence the hxxp), see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20010602231157/http://www.simtel.... The first time seeing it I was always thinking to something like "simulated telnet"...
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.
i bet this is something an ai could help with. "write a simple telnet client in python. It only needs to connect to the host and display what the host sends. conform to any connection initialization requirements per rfc 854". That would probably get you close.
/edit front page of google did this and it worked for me. Need to do a pip install telnetlib3
import telnetlib3
import sys
def simple_telnet_client(host, port=23):
"""
Connects to a telnet server and prints incoming data.
Compliant with RFC 854 (via telnetlib handling of NVTs).
"""
try:
# Initialize connection
print(f"Connecting to {host}:{port}...")
tn = telnetlib3.Telnet(host, port)
# Read and display output indefinitely until connection closes
while True:
# read_eager() reads data already available without blocking
data = tn.read_eager()
if data:
sys.stdout.write(data.decode('ascii', errors='ignore'))
sys.stdout.flush()
# Check if socket is closed
if tn.get_socket() is None:
break
except ConnectionRefusedError:
print("Connection refused.")
except Exception as e:
print(f"An error occurred: {e}")
finally:
if 'tn' in locals():
tn.close()
print("\nConnection closed.")
if __name__ == "__main__":
# Example usage:
# simple_telnet_client("telehack.com", 23)
# Replace with desired host
host = input("Enter host: ")
simple_telnet_client(host)
This is expected. Telnet is not encrypted and people are discouraged from using the client or the inetd daemon. It is assumed that if someone installs it manually it is more likely they have a reason to do so and hopefully understand the risks. It will always exist in repositories as there are still a myriad of enterprise appliances that use telnet for management and likely will be the case for the foreseeable future.
There's something pure about text-based interfaces. No loading spinners, no JavaScript frameworks, no cookie banners. Just text.
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