Something to waste a few minutes on in the Terminal

#1 Mon, 9 Apr 2012 - 04:44 68kMLA

Erm, begin by opening the Terminal....

At the bash prompt, enter:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

You'll then have to hit return a couple of times before the magic begins -- and may the ASCII force be with you!

#2 Mon, 9 Apr 2012 - 16:19 68kMLA

pretty cool

i wonder how a Macintosh Se would render those ASCII graphics, whats a good terminal for MacOS?

#3 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 - 00:47 68kMLA

NCSA Telnet, or even MacSSH.

#4 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 - 01:21 68kMLA

AppleWorks 4 or 5 should also be good if you can find a TCP/IP tool for comm toolbox. (IIRC, Black Knight has a free one.)

JR

#5 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 - 01:40 68kMLA

MacTerminal is my favorite:

(Aw, crap, that link is going to die in a couple months when MobileMe iDisk goes away... I'll have to find a new domain host to move all my "random pictures to" before then.)

Sometime this week, when I have a free evening, I'll boot up the Linux server (the rack-mount monstrosity underneath - a quad Itanium rig,) and the Mac 128 and MacTerminal over and try that URL on the Mac-cum-serial-terminal. Unfortunately, my serial terminal boot disk for the Apple IIc died, and I can't get ADTPro to work on the Linux box properly.

#6 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 - 10:25 68kMLA

(Aw, crap, that link is going to die in a couple months

You can upload pictures as attachments to posts here, and use them inline. In fact we encourage it, because of just this issue. See the "Upload attachment" tab below the text entry box. There is a size limit, so if your pic is too large you may have to downsize it and provide a link to the larger off-site original.

#7 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 - 12:44 68kMLA

For some more interactive ASCII sci-fi fun, check out the command-line Star Trek game, a port to Javascript (ie, playable in your browser) of one of the earliest popular computer games.

http://nerici.org/bloggo/p/trek/code/trek.html

#8 Sun, 15 Apr 2012 - 17:05 68kMLA

Thought I'd test NCSA Telnet in an emulator

#9 Thu, 19 Apr 2012 - 21:23 68kMLA

You can also telnet to nethack.alt.org for some Nethack. It's actually pretty fun because so many people play there, you run into a bones level probably 1 out of 5 games.