Telnet Part 1

My Telnet journey started with a search on Telnet to do some reading on how to use it. I found myself looking at a website discussing telnet and how many browsers will run Telnet sites anyway, well that's how I interpreted this anyway "NOTE: If you use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, your telnet program may be already configured to run when you click on a telnet address" (Accessed from http://www.windweaver.com/w95tips5.htm on 8/3/09). So off I went and loaded IE and put in the address we were given.

This resulted in a page loading that looked and operated like any normal web page. I was able to complete the task as I could search for the given author and email myself the results of that search. However I was left feeling as if that was not exactly the required task. This lead me to try the address for the second task in the same way, only to receive a message that the site was forbidden, confirming my hunch that I had not done the task correctly.

I pursued this further by going to the discussion to see how others had approached this task and any issues they may have had. Sure enough someone had a suggestion of going to Start/Run and typing in Telnet (Thanks Hannah!). I gave this a go and sure enough a little telnet box cam up on the screen that looked a lot like the DOS command box.

Confident that I was now on the right track I typed in the address, only to get another error message! Noticing that just like with DOS there is a help command I typed in ?/help and got a list of all the available commands, as follows.


This lead me to type in o library.deakin.edu.au and finally connect properly. I selected v for the display option, which was a random guess then followed the rest of the task instructions. There were two authors with the surname listed so I emailed both results to myself. The following shows the first email received.


Thoughts and Reflection
Once I finally got Telnet working I was not overly impressed with it. I didn't feel that it really provided any more functions that the Deakin library website provided. Maybe if I hadn't gone to their website instead first I may have been more impressed.

I found the interface of Telnet straight forward to use, though this may be because I grew up using a Commodore 64 and later a DOS based system which had a very similar interface. I think I'm showing my age a bit now!

One major issue I had with the interface was the inability to use cut and paste. As a result I mistyped the authors name at first and had to fix this up when there were no results. I also found myself double checking my spelling of everything and unfortunately I make a lot of typos, and this slowed down the whole process a bit.

Forward to task two... hopefully that will lift my opinion of Telnet.

A final note: I went back and had another look at that web site late in the day... If only I had clicked on the link to go to the next page in the first place, I would of got the instructions on how to use Telnet properly in the first place!