Fun with Telnet
26 comments
·June 17, 2025tripflag
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?
angelofthe0dd
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.
hombre_fatal
Having played MUDs as a preteen, I dabbled again in them a few years ago when I found some Spanish language servers. Thought it might be an interesting way to practice Spanish.
Ended up on mud.balzhur.org:5400 where I befriended a blind Venezuelan guy.
And after a while I soon realized that everyone on the server was probably blind.
Pretty fascinating.
I logged in just the other day and saw that he still plays daily. I want to talk to him again, but I need to go through the noob tutorial to remember how to do anything.
JdeBP
Oh that's annoying. They send LF then CR for newline on the wire, instead of CR then LF per RFC 5198.
0x445442
Not sure how many are from 30 years ago but...
mtillman
Here’s a helpful list too https://www.topmudsites.com/.
t1234s
The zoomable map is wild.. I didn't think you could use that level of mouse integration with telnet.
justusthane
Mouse movement in the terminal is signalled by ANSI escape codes, which are just characters sent along with everything else and interpreted by the remote program, so it really has nothing to do with Telnet.
Incredibly cool to see that in action though! That map is incredible.
NoSalt
I love the map ... it is glorious!
abalashov
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
... bro. I know it's a DeVry Cloud DevOps certificate, but...
NoSalt
Did you seriously just say "hitherto unimaginable"?
indigodaddy
It is on every system, kinda (well curl usually is):
~ $ curl -v telnet://1.1.1.1:443
* Trying 1.1.1.1:443...
* Connected to 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) port 443
--
~ $ curl -v telnet://1.1.1.1:22
* Trying 1.1.1.1:22...
^C ~ $
abalashov
I didn't know curl could do that. Something never every day... thanks!
Having said that, in the world of my customers' systems, neither telnet nor curl can be presumed, it seems.
bawolff
I dont really see how that is any different from netcat with -v option.
abalashov
I will grant that it's a matter of taste and the prejudices of being O.G., but the subtle visual difference between:
$ nc -v 172.30.110.9 22
[literally nothing]
$ telnet 172.30.110.9 22
Trying 172.30.110.9...
b0a04gl
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
mingus88
It was social media without capitalism. Honestly, a utopia.
We logged in daily because there was always new content to discover. A new fileshare with obscure content or a zine with cool ascii art. It’s a shame that everything is fed to us now. That sense of discovery is largely gone.
It’s interesting to me how that got flipped upside down. People log on daily to consume viral content or meme templates that is in everyone’s feed. Early BBS culture was all about finding the niche where you fit in.
Shadowmist
We don’t all get the same feed.
pixxel
[dead]
piker
>telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 23
hugged to death?
infiniteregrets
indeed, we wanted to build an example for a quickstart to showcase "data in motion" and starwars seemed like a perfect fit, the OG had IP blocks in place which made it really difficult to use, so we thought of finding some OSS project that we could self-host and after a lot of searching we found "ascii-movie" (our patch: https://github.com/s2-streamstore/ascii-movie) and the end result was just as similar to towel.blinkenlights.nl -- https://s2.dev/docs/quickstart or simply telnet starwars.s2.dev 23
ps, it is running on fly.io so please don't melt the poor baby
JdeBP
Amusingly, the original that I wanted to improve upon a quarter of a century ago still works.
My improved version written in Java no longer does.
theblazehen
It's been dead for years
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!