A list of fun destinations for telnet

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nostalgia and First Encounters with Telnet

  • Many recall telnet as their first “secret door” into the internet: ASCII Star Wars, talkers, BBSes, MUDs, and early Unix shell accounts.
  • Telnet was widely used to explore SMTP/POP3, learn RFCs, write first email clients and web servers, and debug network services.
  • MUDs in particular were formative: teaching programming, creating long-term friendships, and sometimes wrecking grades or delaying graduations.
  • Some remember dial-up ISP tech support training explicitly including “sending an email via telnet to port 25.”

Star Wars ASCII and towel.blinkenlights.nl

  • Multiple people associate telnet almost exclusively with the Star Wars ASCII animation.
  • There’s confusion whether towel.blinkenlights.nl is dead; traceroutes show it working over IPv6 (and possibly intermittently over IPv4).
  • Some users had scripts and email signatures that piped output from this server until it stopped working for them.

Retro Services and Modern Alternatives

  • Alternative destinations mentioned: telehack.com, various Star Wars SSH services, console games (Pong/Breakout/Tetris, Doom in the terminal), and many MUDs (e.g., BatMUD, Ancient Anguish).
  • Other nostalgic or still-running systems: SDF for free shell accounts, TWENEX, BBSes, and IBM mainframe / pub400-like systems.
  • Some argue the real “gems” are obscure shells, BBSes, and telecom backends still using telnet internally over VPNs.

Security, Clients, and Practicalities

  • People note telnet is no longer installed by default on many systems; netcat or SSH are more common tools now.
  • One thread warns that telnet to arbitrary services can be “more dangerous than a website” due to ANSI escape sequences attacking terminal emulators; others question if that’s really “much more” dangerous than JavaScript.
  • A recent CVE related to terminal handling is cited as evidence that ANSI can be a serious attack vector.
  • Consensus: telnet is unencrypted and discouraged on the open internet, but still lives on in secure internal networks and retro hobbyist spaces.

Text-Only Futures and Protocol Lore

  • Several imagine retreating to text-based systems (Gopher, Gemini, IRC, Finger) as an escape from ads, tracking, and “AI slop,” though others point out propaganda and spam work fine in plain text too.
  • The thread includes playful protocol references (HELO/EHLO, Finger, CAPTCHA puzzles) and domain jokes (telnet.org/.com/.net, tel.net, teln.et).