All entries for Monday 25 May 2009

got cli?

Writing about web page http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

Someone told me about this site the other day. Well worth checking out if you're *nix command line inclined. It also reminded me of something which isn't actually commandlinefu at all really, just delightfully pointless. Namely that you can watch Star Wars (Episode VI) in ASCII animation via telnet:

$ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I had quite a collection of ASCII asciimation around 15 years ago. Back in the days when websites were still something of a novelty. When telnet was still an acceptable method of connecting to remote hosts over the Internet as SSH hadn't been invented. Long before the invention of bittorrent and material of a binary nature could be obtained by downloading sticking together than decoding a bunch of uuencoded posts on a usenet group, provided you had the bandwidth and patience to do so. Before email was sullied by the introduction of HTML formatting, clients which allow you to tag the message as being 'urgent' and ~95% of it became spam. And all this was fields...

Mike Willis : 25 May 2009 11:59 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem