Telnet | NCSA Telnet
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NCSA Telnet

The program that we are going to use to implement telnet is NCSA TELNET, which is a freeware implementation of telnet produced by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA).



Initiating a Telnet Session

Open NCSA Telnet by double-clicking on its icon. From the resulting menu, choose "Open Connection" from under "File", as illustrated in the adjacent image. The resulting popup login screen looks like the figure below.

You may make a telnet connection by typing into the "Host/Session Name" window the telnet address to which you wish to connect and hitting "Enter" or "Return". In the example shown, the address is locis.loc.gov.

Try typing this address into the login window for NCSA Telnet and see what happens. You may exit from the resulting telnet session by choosing "Close" from the NCSA Telnet menu.

This is an example of a telnet login that does not require a password, because it has been set up to allow "Anonymous Logins"; that is, it permits logins from people who do not have accounts on the computer with the IP address locis.loc.gov.

More Advanced Commands


If you use telnet frequently, you can store common telnet addresses in the program so that they can be accessed from a popup menu, as illustrated in the adjacent figure. You may consult the user's help files for NCSA Telnet to learn how to do this and other things, but you already know the important thing: how to make a telnet connection to an arbitrary IP address.

At one time telnet was a very important means of obtaining information on the Web. This function has almost entirely been taken over by Web browsers now. It is still important, however, as a way to log into remote machines, particularly those running Unix operating systems. If you have an account on such a system, you can use telnet to log into your account from any machine supporting telnet on the internet.

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