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!
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 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 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 ;)
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 * * *
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.
Very cool, some nice nostalgia looking through that list!
Missed a trick not being able to “telnet telnet.org” though. :-)
nethack.alt.org is conspicuously absent...
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|"
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)
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)