alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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We run a copy using https://github.com/gabe565/ascii-movie, you can `nc starwars.s2.dev 23`
It's our favorite way of demoing s2.dev, https://x.com/jrdi/status/2014318511120670859
Not many moving pictures either. It was like the literary age of the internet.
The tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com
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
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!