Back then we had large monitors with black background and green text font; for most people black background and white text was probably more common, but I remember having played that MUD for some weeks on such a setup (on a campus site, so these computers were used by students; we only had access to the campus on the weekend as the main guy's father in our group worked at that university).
It actually was fun to use telnet like that and play the MUD, even if inconvenient. Of course our group soon switched to MUD clients that were more convenient to use, so using telnet became super-rare. I only used telnet a few more times after that. About three times again playing lateron when I had no internet connection, and for a few other things too, unrelated to MUDs, e. g. testing websites and similar activities.
For connections, I kind of use ssh much more frequently so, even on windows via the tabby terminal. It is not as convenient on Linux (there I tend to prefer KDE konsole) but it works fairly well.
I have not used telnet in quite some years now, but I still remember fondly to having typed commands to search for herbs in a meadow on that MUD (well, room designated was meadows and you could find herbs which would replenish over time, so you could search, sell and so forth; I have not played any MUDs since decades but it was fun in the 1990s era).
Telnet will probably never die since it is so simple, but I think it is also not quite as important as it was, say, in the 1990s or so. Would be interesting for statistics that could measure this more objectively.
[0]: https://assets.denon.com/documentmaster/us/heos_cli_protocol...
I do remember reading a long time ago telnet does/can support encryption. But when I looked at the systems I have access to, the manuals have no mention of that.
If you have a well secured LAN where trust is social SSH gets you nothing. SMTP telnet http being plain were from days when users were able to actually reason about what was happening within their OS. If there’s anything that should be scoffed at its us now with our bloated opaque corporate controlled OSes.
How does one do a measurement of traffic like this? You would have to own the nodes in the packet route to be able to see traffic, but TerraceNetworks or GreyNoise don't seem to be companies that do that. How do they get the data to analyze?
No one is stopping you from using the telnet client. And really you should just use netcat
The Day the Telnet Died