My favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise...
People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever
Ah, so this is why I suddenly got a bunch of email.
Hey all, site owner here. Thanks for the visits and all the fun stories! I really miss this era of computing. Feel free to let me know if you have something that should be added to the site.
Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1]
Back in a time when you had to pay out the nose for long distance calling, you had outdial service through X.25 PSN or more often, as ARPANet turned into Internet, you had Telnet accessible outdials.
My first introduction to the internet was through the telnet-based EW-too talkers like Foothills (Boston U) and Forest (UTS). I have very fond memories of staying up late talking to people from all over the globe. It was truly amazing to me.
The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.
The first BBS I used in the 80's eventually ended up with a telnet daemon but its owner passed away and I think the person that took it over eventually shut lois.org down. Domain is still registered. I can't fault them, it was an ancient system.
A list of fun destinations for telnet
(telnet.org)338 points by tokyobreakfast 27 January 2026 | 114 comments
Comments
There's something pure about text-based interfaces. No loading spinners, no JavaScript frameworks, no cookie banners. Just text.
People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever
Hey all, site owner here. Thanks for the visits and all the fun stories! I really miss this era of computing. Feel free to let me know if you have something that should be added to the site.
Here's some site meta-history too:
https://telnet.org/history/
Missed a trick not being able to “telnet telnet.org” though. :-)
[1] http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/internetinfo.txt
Not that it buys you anything other than being retro. :)
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/underground/hacking/INTERN...
Too bad mobile killed the dialtone.
WeatherUnderground shut its API down in 2018.
The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.
The one and only. Still online to my surprise.
#set signature="cat ~/.signature && telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 666 | tail -n3|"
> doom.w-graj.net 666
> Play Doom in the terminal (code and details)
Captcha: Repeat the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times.
All my answers failed. I guess I must be a computer.
Maybe then we just go back to an oldschool text based way of communicating.
No google. No socials. Just text.