Senior psychology major Bia Lewis was taught to check her e-mail in a program that used outdated commands and could not display pictures when she transferred to the university in fall 2003.
Lewis is one of the last university students of the Telnet generation. University students have used the system’s Pong-level technology for more than a decade, but they are a dying breed as the Telnet faithful graduate and give way to younger Mail@UMD users.
At previous orientations, students learned to use the Telnet Program for Internet News and E-mail. But in spring 2003, WAM e-mail accounts were abandoned in favor of the web-based e-mail interface.
In the current era of BlackBerrys, iPods and lifelike computer games, Telnet’s basic black background and white text is out of touch with today’s tech-savvy generation. A pack of upperclassmen are the last stalwarts of the campus community that never bothered to switch over to mail@umd.edu, preferring to stick with the WAM prefix on their e-mail accounts and use what seems like stone-age technology instead of the university’s web server.
Telnet was phased out by the Office of Information Technology in favor of Mail@UMD because of security concerns. OIT warns on its website that Telnet messages are not encrypted, meaning hackers can access information easily.
OIT could not estimate with any precision how many students still use Telnet. Many sophomores and freshmen respond to comments about Telnet with blank stares, evidence older Telnet users such Lewis are becoming rare.
“I had know idea how to switch [to the web server],” Lewis said. “No one ever commented to me about using Telnet. I think I mentioned [Telnet] to a younger student once and she had no idea what I was talking about.”
Despite security issues and an awkward appearance, Telnet has advantages, Lewis said. For example, it is accessible by the Start-Run command on any Windows-equipped computer connected to the Internet.
“I’ve always been able to check my e-mail,” she said. “Sometimes other [web] systems won’t work because the server is down.”
The Telnet PINE system was created in 1989 at the University of Washington at Seattle to provide an e-mail server for naive users that may have computer anxiety.
“PINE has two very strong things going for it,” said Spence Spencer from OIT’s User Support Services. “It’s dead reliable — it’s actually the reference IMAP client, written by the same people at U-Washington that wrote the standard IMAP software that almost every e-mail system in the world uses to show you your e-mail — and it’s absolutely positively virus proof.”
Viruses are harmless in Telnet, Spencer said, because they will not run unless the user makes an effort to run them. Telnet PINE is also versatile, working on Unix and PCs, OIT’s David Arnold said.
“The latest release of PINE came out in January 2005, so it’s still being developed and supported,” he said.
Despite these updates elsewhere, the university’s version of the Telnet-based mail program faces extinction.
“Unfortunately, Telnet was conceived in a time when the Internet was a very different place than it is today,” Spencer said.
