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good old days on the internet

Posted by Nathaniel.

I just came across a facebook group talking about telnet… those were the good old days.

Dialing into the 6 modems in the pool with your 9600 baud modem. (and redialing and redialing and redialing since they were busy)
telneting into the server.*
using pine to read email and then fingering people at different schools to see if they were logged in.**

*Of course, it was the telnet program that actually dialed the modem and you might have had to tell it ATDT to get it to connect. I’m not even sure if we even used the full TCP/IP setup since I don’t think we started worrying about IP addresses until a year later when Mosaic was in use and I was hard-wired in a dorm.

**Of course, none of these programs are in use any more, mainly because of security holes. You should be able to finger people on your own machine, but probably not across machines and definitely not on different campuses. (Well, the sysadmin could be an idiot.) And telnet is completely replaced by ssh now.

Good times.   

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 3:29 pm and is filed under geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “good old days on the internet”

  1. Holly Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 5:39 pm Using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    i made a very, very brief foray into telnet. i think that was back when we were still dialing into bucknell for our net, off mom’s account (for free). a friend of mine wanted me to join some rpg game using telnet. i logged in once, but the idea of an rpg at the time really confused the hell out of me, so i never went back. i also didn’t want to create a character, since that was also back in the day when i was afraid of leaving traces of my presence on the net with screen names and such, for fear of looking stupid. with a fake name. i was really timid then.

  2. Tim Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 8:56 pm Using Safari Safari 419.3 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    Hell yeah!

    Telnet!

    Back in the day when I used to know how to do computer stuff!

    w00t!

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