Module One - Telnet

Ah, telnet. When function is more important than form.
Using the telnet interface to the library database shows just how much crud is tacked onto applications now. Even on my satellite connection - where everything I type is delayed a good second or so before it appears on my screen - it's still quite usable.

I suppose that I'm comfortable with telnet, having used it for many years and having been brought up on quite a few text-based adventure games on my first computer ("You are in a deep dark jungle. It looks a bit clearer to the west."). I wonder if those that have only ever had exposure to a GUI (be it windows/mac/whatever) would have had their eyes opened by this.

You don't need a fancy interface or pretty graphics to do most tasks. Bulk data entry operators would prefer everything gets out of their way so that they can type. Not having a keyboard shortcut means precious seconds are lost for them as they take their hands from the keyboard and reach for the mouse to manipulate something in the gui. And they hate it. From them, the scale gradually shifts from function to form, to the point where your average application is covered in curved edges, drop shadows, colour gradients, animated drop-down menus and a bunch of other stuff that Marketing hopes will get you to buy the new version of their product, even though the actual underlying function is mostly the same as the previous version, just with bugfixes.

But the average person likes the bling and gui's do make some things easier to do - multitasking being the obvious thing, with the pieces-of-paper-on-a-desktop metaphor. I was going to say that applications are easier to use with a gui, but that's a crock - a well thought out text application, with good menuing, performs just as well as a similar gui app - I use them all the time with my linux laptop. A poorly designed user interface, be it text or gui, is a hinderance no matter what.

And as for towel.blinkenlights.nl - it's a creative use for something that was never really intended to work like that. Sure, telnet (and terminal emulation, specifically) allows for putting the cursor here and there, to help make nice menus, and areas for text entry and so on. I find it interesting that the star wars movie was done in telnet many years (2001-ish) after the rise of http (1993-ish) - basically, briefly reviving a system that some internet users had never seen. It's anachronistic quality appeals to those that like to think outside the box - it's doing something (playing a lo-res, soundless animation rather laboriously) that any cheap cellphone could do a whole lot better.

There were plenty of other telnet-style tricks out there that were common before the multimedia marvel that is the current computer came into being. Dot matrix printers grinding out ASCII pinups, PC speakers that usually just beeeeeped churning out polyphonic music, text-mode graphics adaptors suddenly tickled into strange undocumented resolutions for blocky versions of Space Invaders - all of them made by people who bent the staid, only-for-business-purposes image of computers into something else entirely.