>telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 23

hugged to death?

I recall towel.blinkenlights.nl mentioned you would get a different version of the video (with colors) if you connected from IPv6. I've found rips online of the plain grayscale version, but not the colored one.

Anyone happen to have a recording of it?

I'm old enough to remember the days of Telnet and Gopher. Back then, Telnet was key in the early "MUDs" (text-based, multiplayer games). MEAT MUD and Looney MUD were my favorites, but I honestly must have tried over 100. I sometimes wonder how much of the old "Telnet Internet" still exists from 30 years ago.

Surfers ... Foothills ... can't remember the rest.

Who would have known that basically the same functionality would later become a billion / trillion? dollar story (whatssap).

my older brother used to dial into local BBSes late at night, tying up the phone line and pissing off everyone. mostly forums, file sharing, a few ascii games. he showed me how to telnet into some later on when it moved online. that story about the blind MUD player reminded me some folks never left. they just kept logging in. for them it was just... daily. guess some of these old servers turned into routine for people

Am I the only one who still thinks that telnet is a basic utility that should be installed on every system? It's a lot easier and more explicit to verify that a TCP listener is working using telnet than netcat and the like.

I know I'm living in a different and hitherto unimaginable universe when I paste modern cloud-devops sysadmin types the output of a hung telnet connection attempt to port 22, as implicit evidence that it's blocked by a firewall or whatnot, e.g.

    $ telnet 172.30.110.9 22
    Trying 172.30.110.9...
    ^C

and they say, "But it's SSH, so you can't use Telnet!"

... bro. I know it's a DeVry Cloud DevOps certificate, but...

   $ nc -v 172.30.110.9 22
   [literally nothing]

   $ telnet 172.30.110.9 22
   Trying 172.30.110.9...

The zoomable map is wild.. I didn't think you could use that level of mouse integration with telnet.

In the 90s, Book Stacks (books.com, eventually bought-and-destroyed by amazon), in addition (or before?) having a website, had a text-only online bookshop via telnet. I bought some titles that way. It was pretty cool!

Thinking about telnet & social media, I do remember that brief moment in time when the majority of my college's students had internet access but the web hadn't been invented yet. Telnet (along with talk, finger .plan's, newsgroups) had its moment in the sun. Enough so that I had a professor who would joke with us about getting our papers done before we'd hit telnet.

And thinking about MUDs, there is no better / worse way to feel the crush of time than finding your old MUD is still online. I found mine again a few years ago. Couldn't remember my password so made a new char. Used "finger" to look at my main. Last logged in 9000+ days ago. Looked up my friends who I used to spend hours with. Around the same. 9000+ days. Seeing it quantified in days rather than years made it more difficult and more personal. 9,000 days just gone like that.

Had a pretty neglectful childhood, in my early adolescence to pass the time locked in my room I was gifted by a dead grandma's estate an ancient 80's IBM PC that had some network capability and could telnet that no one else could figure out how to use so it was put in my room. I ended up somehow figuring out via stuff I'd read in the school library and a web search on the school computer that I could telnet to chat rooms. I don't remember much of it, and a lot of it looking back was probably fairly creepy/inappropriate for a 12-14 year old, but I think just being able to log on to this device when I was forcefully isolated and talk to complete strangers to pass the time really helped me in a way that diving into books I'd read a thousand times couldn't.

I wish I'd done something better with that time other than just chatrooms but c'est la vie.