fsxNet Wiki

This is by no means an exhaustive intro to Telnet, but a few basic notions are needed. The reason we're going into Telnet at all is because at the time this is being written (March 2017) dial-up is not really a thing anymore, and of the remaining BBSs, the large majority is accessible via Telnet, with some featuring SSH as an option.

Now, a robust BBS package would be written in a way that decouples the transport interface from the rest of the system, so you can just add new transports and maintain functionality (you may want to add SSH and a Web transport in the future, for example) but since this is an entry-level tutorial, we'll focus on Telnet and not worry too much about architecture.

Telnet is these days an obsolete protocol, since it's insecure and bound to a set of archaic notions by today's standards.