Comment by alexjplant

I discovered Telnet from some schlocky book [1] my parents had bought at Barnes and Noble about "Ethical Hacking" written by a guy who was later given a "Security Charlatan of the Year" award at DEF CON 20. I'd no idea it was a protocol - I thought it was just a program that let you talk directly to services like SMTP. I found netcat and friends later and thus never really got to use telnet for its intended purpose.

[1] https://archive.org/details/unofficialguidet0000fadi_r0y3/pa...