“The internet was the evolution of telnet, which allowed users to connect to bulletin board systems via phone lines. However, connecting to those systems required that the user know the connection address and port.”
What? This is so confused that it’s “not even wrong”. Did GPT-3 write this? :)
As for the part that is just wrong, there’s never been an internet where you had to know the connection address (there were periodically updated host files) and you never needed to specify the port for telnet (it’s a “well known port”).
> As for the part that is just wrong, there’s never been an internet where you had to know the connection address (there were periodically updated host files)
Not necessarily. If your Internet connection was via KA9Q NOS over a DOS packet driver running SLFP (the predecessor to SLIP), you had to keep your own hosts file, and people would trade things like Scott Yannoff's list. If you look at http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/gnu/funet/historical-funet-gnu... for example, they'd list IP addresses and ports because some users didn't have systems connected to DNS.
People aren't talking about Telnet(23/tcp) as a protocol, they use that terminology because the command-line unix "telnet" client when connecting to a non-Telnet-service (meaning doesn't exchange WILL/WONT handshakes etc) on another port, it effectively acted like netcat. So if there was a cool game listening on 10.123.45.6 port 2000, people would type "telnet 10.123.45.6 2000" to connect to the game from many places.
I never understood why that sort of list wasn’t just a hosts file. But I wasn’t really involved in the SLFP world; maybe it didn’t support hosts files?
I guess my POV is that before DNS was introduced, the Internet had a hosts file you were expected to keep up to date, and after DNS, if you didn’t have DNS, what you had wasn’t quite “the Internet”.
> the Internet had a hosts file you were expected to keep up to date
I wasn't online back then so don't take my word for it, but my understanding is that different people maintained different hosts files. There was not a single Internet-wide hosts file, although one of these hosts files was somewhat more popular than others (due to who was maintaining it).
I used the Internet at CMU during the pre-DNS era, and my recollection is that the official hosts file came from SRI-NIC (this is corroborated by the ICANN history [0]).
Telnet is a protocol on the Internet, not a predecessor of the Internet. To connect to a BBS using phone lines, you just dialed its phone number; this has no relation to the Internet. Even if we generously consider a phone number to be a “connection address”, there’s no “port” involved and DNS has nothing to do with phone numbers.
What? This is so confused that it’s “not even wrong”. Did GPT-3 write this? :)
As for the part that is just wrong, there’s never been an internet where you had to know the connection address (there were periodically updated host files) and you never needed to specify the port for telnet (it’s a “well known port”).