NCSA Telnet
More info
- Creator
- NCSA, University of Illinois
- Released
- 1986
- Type
- Terminal program
The Telnet client from an Illinois supercomputing centre that gave Macs and PCs their own way onto the internet.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released it in 1986 so researchers could log into the centre's machines from their desks. Neither Mac OS nor MS-DOS shipped with a TCP/IP stack, so the program brought its own. It handled several sessions at once in separate windows, emulated Tektronix graphics terminals and included a built-in FTP server — an unusual luxury on a computer that otherwise had no idea what a network was.
It was free and turned up on countless university floppy disks. Seven years later the same centre released Mosaic, and many of those same Macs showed their owners a first web page. The Telnet client stayed in service for considerably longer than anyone should admit.