alt Hacker NewsI first used telnet in the 1990s to connect and play a text-based MUD.
Back then we had large monitors with black background and green text font; for most people black background and white text was probably more common, but I remember having played that MUD for some weeks on such a setup (on a campus site, so these computers were used by students; we only had access to the campus on the weekend as the main guy's father in our group worked at that university).
It actually was fun to use telnet like that and play the MUD, even if inconvenient. Of course our group soon switched to MUD clients that were more convenient to use, so using telnet became super-rare. I only used telnet a few more times after that. About three times again playing lateron when I had no internet connection, and for a few other things too, unrelated to MUDs, e. g. testing websites and similar activities.
For connections, I kind of use ssh much more frequently so, even on windows via the tabby terminal. It is not as convenient on Linux (there I tend to prefer KDE konsole) but it works fairly well.
I have not used telnet in quite some years now, but I still remember fondly to having typed commands to search for herbs in a meadow on that MUD (well, room designated was meadows and you could find herbs which would replenish over time, so you could search, sell and so forth; I have not played any MUDs since decades but it was fun in the 1990s era).
Telnet will probably never die since it is so simple, but I think it is also not quite as important as it was, say, in the 1990s or so. Would be interesting for statistics that could measure this more objectively.
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> room designated was meadows and you could find herbs which would replenish over time
I'm sure several MUDs did this, but, this sounds an awful lot like my home MUD of Achaea, which started in ~1997, still exists (healthily!), and has this exact system :)
The last time I used Telnet was back in the late 80s for mostly CS class pranking, to remotely launch 50+ Xeyes Xwindows widgets on my class mate's Sun Workstation screens through a timed bash script. Watching them freak out as dozens of eyeballs suddenly appeared, while acting all innocent.
Surprisingly measuring legitimate Telnet usage may be even harder than measuring attacks! Getting representative metrics of benign src-dst endpoint pairs while controlling neither approaches impossibility, especially since at global scale it’d be mixed with (I suspect) orders of magnitude more attack traffic. Best you could probably do is measure on a clean-ish ISP like a university network.
The only time I use telnet is when I'm building something with the socket API and want to make sure I did the setup/connection handover correctly so I make a quick echo server and connect over telnet just to confirm its working.
Were your MUDs on port 23? <runs and hides>
For Tiny* servers, "raw telnet" was considered a ghetto experience. The worst part was that the asynchronous output would just stream in whether or not you were done typing, and you'd invariably lose track of what your input line looked like. So the primary task of a TinyMUD client was to separate them. Some used a "split screen", and some just kept refreshing the input line as new output was displayed.
None of our MUDs ever appeared on port 23 and none of our servers ever spoke "The TELNET Protocol" as found in RFC 854. Telnet was simply the bundled TCP client that you could use for anything.
The other cool features for a MUD client was using macros to perform repeated tasks or say interesting things, and /hilite and /gag were indispensable. /gag silenced/muted a player or a pattern-match of your choice, and so to play with "raw telnet" was to unblock all your /gagged players and let them get under your skin again. A fate truly worse than death (well you got paid "insurance" for dying, so many people enjoyed the experience.)
Also popular in Tiny* clients was cursor line-editing and a command history. One client developer was sort of a troll, and so when he forked "tinywar" it began to feature some automation that could permit a player to make a real nuisance of themselves. But he was also a great programmer, and not all tinywar users were trolls, so it got put to good use.
Ultimately, Explorer_Bob wrote TinyFugue, and Ken Keys "Hawkeye" took over development, pushing it into amazing heights on a level with MUSH programming, and TinyFugue basically became the gold standard client for Unix and was also ported to Win32, and ultimately abandoned in an extremely stable state. I went to school with Ken. Miss you, man!