Telnet – Task B

After my brief encounter with Telnet thanks to Deakin University, we have been asked to access towel.blinkenlights.nl via telnet.

Wow! What a difference. This Star Wars retelling using only ASCII is something to behold indeed. It really made me think of just what these legacy applications of the Internet must be truly capable of and how world changing they must of been when they were created. I am still blown away by the loading times, and that someone had put so much effort into coding the presentation, all for simple enjoyment.

Telnet was clearly created to fulfill a need, but it just simply amazes me how creativity can spring from such a need. It is also quite obvious that once the needs outgrew the capabilities of Telnet, other methods and applications were created to fulfill those needs.

Telnet – Task A

The wonderful, if not dated, world of Telnet. Having explored a university library catalogue using the in-built Terminal application on my Mac, I am reminded of the old days of computing, when everything was command prompt based, and even when using the local library catalogue in person during high school. It is interesting to “go back” and use Telnet again after being so exposed to the “new developments” of the internet and the World Wide Web, it really makes you remember you are using a computer and communicating with a computer program. This is something that the modern day internet has tried to break down, to make the internet as user-friendly, inter-personal as possible. Using Telnet really does give you that sense of using a “Human-Computer Interface”.

The results from my Telnet Search on the author name Bennahum, as emailed to me by the system, are below:

You searched for the AUTHOR: bennahum

 2 AUTHORS found, with 2 entries; AUTHORS 1-2 are:

1   Bennahum David A 1936  ……………………………    1 entry

2   Bennahum Ninotchka  ………………………………    1 entry

What really stands out for me from doing this little excercise is the speed in which the search was able to be performed at. Using a web-based catalogue would have taken much longer to display the results due to the reliance on graphic heavy layouts and larger file sizes.

Welcome To The INterNET!

Having just begun studying Internet Communications with Curtin University via Open Universities Australia, we are required to use a “blog” to create a personal Learning Log of all that we learn throughout the duration of the course. So without any further disruption - here it is!