[Infowarrior] - Telnet, Dead at 35. Happy Birthday and RIP

[Richard Forno]

For all the bells and whistle added to Microsoft's Vista, the OS is the
first internet-age Windows release to omit an important vestige of
networking history -- Telnet, which turns 35 tomorrow.

It was April 3rd, 1972 that Jon Postel published RFC 318, a svelte 4,600
word document describing a "standard method of interfacing terminal devices
at one site to processes at another site."

Devised in a simpler time, Telnet has no encryption and doesn't come close
to meeting modern security standards for logging onto a remote machine. It's
gone virtually unused for years (geeks still use the client to debug TCP
services, but only because it's there). Yet somehow the Telnet client has
always managed to stick around in Windows, Linux and Mac OS releases like
the gill slits in human embryos. Until now.

If you're a Vista user, you can celebrate Telnet Day tomorrow by defiantly
reinstalling the deleted Telnet client. Microsoft's instructions are here.

There's also this history of Telnet, the original RFC 318, and a super cool
list of still-operating public Telnet sites, including the U.S. Library of
Congress. 

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http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/04/telnet_dead_at_.html