I came across this the other day.

And I must say, it’s an excellent way to make older machines more ‘accessible’ to everyone.  I know it’s only going to encourage ‘kids’ to get into VAX’s etc, and of course as many are aware, Vista and beyond have removed the telnet client.. (and hyperterm for that matter!!!).

We are now living in a world devoid of telnet & rs232.

Enter flashterm_

Flashterm, is one of those fancy GCC for flash projects that uses the flash socket API to create a telnet client!  Right now they are focused on ANSI emulation geared towards BBS’s.  But if you’ve got a firewall to redirect ports, or if you are running the ‘policy’ server directly you can let people into your machine, and all they need is a modern browser/flash combination which you can safely say all ‘kids’ machines will have (and yes even my parents, as they LOVE those silly flash games, and dancing cats).

Anyways, the control key is NOT captured, so there is no control+d to kill your session, but a ‘reload’ of the browser, or closing the tab will do it just as well.  Robots doesn’t work correctly, but all & all it’s a super simple way to get back to your machines…

I’ve set one up in the meantime as a test…

http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/telnet

Although I don’t know how long I’ll keep it online.  But it does create the possibility now of having not only information on various ancient UNIX but to allow others to use them!.. And for most internet users, with no real downloads as that flash thing is EVERYWHERE…..