2013-05-09 03:01 update: I was terribly wrong in this post, PCManX had many more updates after 2005, I just didn’t find the appropriate page at the time. As you can see from the git log, there have been commits up until the Year of our Lord 2013.

Today I tried the BBS specific telnet client I talked about yesterday. The X11 version is ancient, last updated in 2005, so I wasn’t really confident it would work at all, more the opposite.

I downloaded, I executed. It was just missing two libs that were quickly installed, and it seemed to run fine. I clicked connect, first entry in the menu, “Site List”

Function not implemented yet!
Debug: Site List goes here.

Then don’t put it in the first menu entry, silly.

Seems quite okay though, it’s nicer than using the VTE terminal (for fonts, for example). It just has the unfortunate tendency to segfault every now and then. It crashes when I try adding a favourite for example, but it seems to happen randomly sometimes. Well, it’s from 2005 so it’s nice that it just runs, though.

I had a look at their ascii art boards—very nice stuff. The animated text art movies are fun, too. Prior to this the only exposure I had to animated telnet text art was the (insanely awesome) Star Wars ascii movie, I imagine those old BBS had a lot more goodies like that, but I’m 21, it’s mainly from before my time.

It was funny seeing an animated (」・ω・)」うー!(/・ω・)/にゃー! post, too: