Module 1 - Telnet Task B

So as the Star Wars fan that I am, I was quite excited to telnet into towel.blinkenlighs.nl. Of course after after reading my fellow students blogs I was ready for what was in store, and let me say, once in I wasn't disappointed.

For the uninitiated; telnetting into towel.blinkenlights.nl gives you an ASCII art animation of Star Wars Episode 4 A New Hope. Thats right baby, welcome to geekville!

ASCII art is is made from ASCII and is one of those terribly geek things to do. Originally created in the
late 60's it took off in the 70's and 80's allowing people to create images and share them when bandwidth was limited and printers couldn't create the photo realistic prints we can today.

While bandwidth today is cheap and expansive and printers can run of high quality photos, I don't think something such as ASCII art will ever completely leave us, apparently it's been around in one form or another since the birth of the typewriter. For me ASCII art is an important part of computing and the internets history, and while no longer part of the mainstream (was it ever) we still use common forms of ASCII art day in, day out.

In fact one form which you may well be familiar with is the simple emoticon :-) This simple form of ASCII art was first created in 1982 and is still helping us communicate feelings and moods.

I suggest having a further look at ASCII art and if you get inspired then have a go at creating some of your own either by hand or if you wish, you can auto generate it.

Module 1 - Telnet Task A

This task required me to utilise Telnet to access the Deakin University library and complete a search.

Before jumping in head first, the first thing I did was to Google a little more information on Telnet and Telnet applications on the Mac. I came across a couple of good sites in particular I found this excellent and simple guide on wikiHow.com. The site also contained some further How To's on checking email with Telnet and the like, but I digress.

After my research, I decided in the end to go down the route of using Mac OS X's built in Telnet client; the Terminal application. Terminal is an application which I am familiar and comfortable with so using it for this task was rather simple.

Logging in to the Deakin library and completing the search was very straight forward. I found that the information presented through Telnet was sparse yet effective, giving me all the details to find the books in the actual library. On further exploration I found that there were a number of features which further helped enhance the search.

While this particular search method was effective and extremely quick, it was frustrating to not have a visual reference or even advanced search options that we take for granted with graphical interfaces. Telnet also lacked any feature for me to check out or borrow a book as many modern web based library interfaces now do. It is from this perspective I found the experience seriously lacking, as I was unable to self serve as I have grown used to on the internet.

This task has given me further understanding of some of the underlying technologies of the internet and their evolution. It was interesting to find that the Telnet protocol was developed in 1969 and while in limited use today, it still has some practical uses as a troubleshooting tool for remote servers and as another resource to search for information.