Telnet

I haven’t played with Telnet for many years and can’t remember much about it. Still I am excited to take another look.
I typed in a question mark to find out what the commands were and that worked! Lucky guess, but I reminded myself not to apply my guessing manoeuvres too often too quickly (edit: at all).
Telnet is really quite easy to use, it didn’t look too foreign for me and I was surprised and impressed with it’s speed especially when retrieving information from Deakin Library and then getting the results file sent back to my student email.

I would still prefer to use the “common” web library portals because telnet is not… colourful and it feels quite old fashioned to use, a bit like MS-DOS.

I looked at towel.blinkenlights.nl for fun – at least I could use telnet again! Very clever ascii production. The characters really did look like those from Star Wars. Blinkenlights was too long for my attention span so feeling a tad guilty; I closed the telnet window before it ended. The creator of this piece would have spent some serious time and thought, positioning the ascii characters just so. Apart from the knowledge, it takes passion to do all that.

Although telnet is still used to some extent, I’ve got my doubts about it being in the hands of us regular users because of its apparent weaknesses regarding data security. From a quick Google search [+why use telnet 2009], I read that telnet is not too secure but it is still used by those who know what they are doing. The expert verbiage used in some of the search results about telnet made me want to run a mile in the opposite direction.

Because of it's flaws, telnet may have assisted in the development of SSH and other more secure protocols in use today. Technology always improves and gets more intuitive as we all thrash it. Telnet deserves some respect.