Task 1: Telnet (B)

TASK B
I didn't just look at the towel.blinkenlights.nl (Star Wars), but also had a look at other recommended telnet sites just for a bit of fun, but received mixed experiences. Star Wars was brilliant, and when I say that there's been a lot of work put into that presentation, it's an understatement. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to see a brilliant piece of art. Looking at other sites though (dr.nostrum.com, Marvin - Eliza like Bot), I found that most were now dead links.At first I thought it was because I was using a Mozilla Firefox browser, and so I tried them on Internet Explorer and they still didn't work. I was quite disappointed at this point as other people on Digg (http://digg.com/tech_news/Great_Sites_to_Telnet_Into_for_Fun) had been commenting on them (some newer posts having issues like me). But one helpful thing that came from this was the comments on Digg, such as "what we used to use before this fancy web stuff" (helfire), and "Brings back great memories of the internet before the web" (no2gates). These comments I think helped me to place my mind in context and understand that in its day this was the 'cream' of the computer. This was their internet, and for its day it worked really well. But as the internet has moved on many of these sites are now dead links, which is sad because some of these sites had obviously been brilliantly entertaining.

One flaw of telnet, like today is the far too easy ability to miss type your address (how frustrating), but you also couldn't cut and paste your address (perhaps using the 'start > run' you can, but as far as I'm aware not once you're in the client) so another bother for me. This has been slightly resolved with today's browsers by cut and paste. It's an interesting experience using this tool and a bit of a gimmick these days, but I really liked the feel of connecting the way the client does (perhaps because you can actually see it connecting), but perhaps it would be too slow for todays impatient age. No one really wants to wait 30 seconds every time they wanted to connect to another server.