alt Hacker NewsA list of fun destinations for telnet
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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]
I was wondering why the Starwars one is not at the top of the list. Then I saw it no longer exists :-(
Note that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website. ANSI escape sequences can seriously mess with your system, RCE included.
Surfers!
For telnet.wiki.gd, there is a captcha:
Captcha: Repeat the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times.
All my answers failed. I guess I must be a computer.
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.
Very cool, some nice nostalgia looking through that list!
Missed a trick not being able to “telnet telnet.org” though. :-)
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.
For those of you curious about what the Star Wars one looked like, the tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com
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|"
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. :)
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.
Related to the last Telnet CVE? Why talking about telnet now otherwise?
~/work/...> telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
zsh: command not found: telnet
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.