THE TELNET NEWS!

Back in 1996, two things occurred which got me interested in amateur packet radio big time. First was a trip to the Milton Ham Fest near Burlington where I sat in on a seminar: the discussion detailed the nuts and bolts of packet radio, which I found to be only moderately interesting. It was during the question and answer session when someone in the audience asked about a connection between amateur packet radio and the Internet. He had overheard a QSO where reference was made to a regional packet radio Internet Gateway. Two ruling packet gurus, one local to the area and the other from Montreal, spoke up and verified the QSO but were very quick to downplay the value of the gateway lamenting that at 1200 baud making use of such a device would be an exercise in frustration.

I suspected a cover up. My interest was peaked. I recalled earlier conversations concerning LONNY where amateur radio operators employed by NBC Television used AX25 nodes to link London and Manhattan, using a commercial undersea cable. But this was different. Here was something I might be able to access myself.

The second event was when I obtained a free IBM PS25 computer. Armed with the PS25 and a KPC3, I quickly located the gateway in question. AMGATE:KA2TCQ was situated at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, 150 miles to the north. The state of the regional packet network was in good shape so it was no problem to access AMGATE:KA2TCQ and then telnet out into the world.

Unlike eQSO and ECHOLINK, packet Internet Gateways received no publicity in any of the amateur radio journals so any knowledge gained was through hands on experience. This inspired me to publish an electronic newsletter known as THE TELNET NEWS, which I distributed globally through the packet BBS mail forwarding system and via Internet e-mail subscription. I published the TELNET NEWS from 1999 through 2004. Toward the end, as the regional packet radio network here in upstate New York tail spun into irreversible degeneration and decay through unintentional negligence and outright abandonment, I shifted from transmitting by radio to keystroking by way of the Internet. At this late date, I still keep the Winpack telnet program on the computer for the occasional foray into the digital world of text. The global network is a now lot smaller but it still has it's followers.

Recently, I discovered something I forgot. On the TWIAR website, some of my TELNET NEWS are hidden away but they are easily accessible. Just check my list of favorite links on this very same blog for some vintage copies of the TELNET NEWS. Most of the information will be out of date but THE TELNET NEWS is an ASCII time capsule chronicling the way things were in a largely unseen galaxy of the amateur radio universe!