Cool Stuff to do with Telnet

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TerminalTelnet may seem like a thing of the past to some people, but there are still plenty of servers out there hosting a telnet service and some of them are–quick frankly–pretty darn cool!

In this post we’ll examine a few public telnet services out there that might be worth a visit, even today!

Starwars Asciimation

$ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

At the top of the list is the Star Wars asciimation! By telnetting to the above domain you’ll first be greeted with some text, but after a few moments you’ll see that you’re presented with an animated ascii version of Star Wars! It certainly looks like some hard work went into putting it together and it’s even cooler that it was converted to a telnet stream. Neat!

The Bofh Excuse Server

$ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 666

From our same friends at blinkenlights.nl comes The Bofh Excuse Server. When you telnet in you’ll see that you are immediately disconnected and a ridiculous and often humorous excuse for the disconnect is provided by the server. This is good for a laugh and could even be used as a prank among techies by providing the wrong hostname and port (a geekier version of the rickroll).

Telehack

$ telnet telehack.com

Telehack is a collection of telnet apps and goodies, including games and jokes. Here’s a sample joke from Telehack’s archive:

For Sale: parachute, used once, never opened, small stain.

The old school games are fun to explore whether you’ve seen them before or not.

MUDs!

$ telnet aardmud.org

Last, but not least: Multi-user dungeons! These interactive, multiplayer games are played entirely through telnet and are still popular even today. The telnet command above will connect you to Aardwolf, one of the more popular and active MUDs available. If telnet video games sounds right up your alley, you can visit The Mud Connector to learn more.

P.S. If you like dungeons but multiplayer isn’t your style, there’s always NetHack. It’s a popular single-player dungeon that also has a text-based interface (although GUI’s are available as well).

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That’s it! It’s not much, but as you can see people are still using telnet and there are still some interesting and fun telnet services out there on the web.

Do you have a fun telnet service you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments! Happy hacking!

  • http://dynv.myopenid.com/ DynV

    Have you been on the Internet for a decade or more? Then you’ll likely remember dialing on it. And there’s a strong possibility you’ve been on or heard of BBS, Bulletin Board Systems. This was–the–thing! I remember having several phone number to dial on in a remote area, 90 miles from anything resembling a city ; there was even a few long-distance numbers, that warrant usage since such promotion isn’t free.

    BBS resemble modern sites, having: FAQ, news, forum, chat, private messaging (email), online games & file sharing. Being text-based, imagine games like flash/apps although only using text, like ASCII art. It emulate multi-node BBS, using a FOSSIL, so there’s interaction between the users should some be connected at the same time ; for chat and games.

    There are some traditional dial-up BBS left but there is also a modern reconstruction using telnet. A nice listing I found is on http://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ A few days ago I joined one and I’m having fun with the games ; I’m being destroyed daily by higher players (although they do limited damage, considering the level difference).

    Bug report: I really wanted to put my grain of salt but I kept clicking and clicking on the Leave a comment link an nothing was happening… well something was happening but out of sight, 800px blow http://s231.photobucket.com/albums/ee81/DynV/screenshots/?action=view&current=techblogistech-comment_800px_below_article.png :(

  • http://www.awesomeblogisawesome.com Sean Fox

    @DynV Thanks for the comment! There are absolutely still BBSs out there, which is both surprising and awesome. Thanks for the link, I might have to check those out and revisit this article some time to talk a bit about the more interesting ones.

    Also, thanks for the bug report! I actually intend to change the layout of the blog in the next couple of months to something a bit simpler than what I have currently (which is a template). Hopefully I can address this issue at that time so it won’t be a problem anymore. :)

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