HyTelnet

~ the last words ~

HyTelnet is older than my internet. It was already finished by the time I first heard a modem negotiate in 1998, and the machine it described was gone by then too: a network you reached by logging into other people's computers rather than by requesting pages from them. I can read the manual for that internet. I cannot remember it.

Peter Scott built it in 1990 at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The problem it solved was blunt. Hundreds of universities had put their library catalogs on telnet, each with its own address, its own login name, its own terminal settings, and its own way of saying goodbye. There was no search engine to ask. There was a man in Saskatchewan writing all of it down.

What he wrote down was more than catalogs by the end: databases, bibliographies, campus information systems, government sites, Freenets, bulletin boards. The list of links to library catalogs from every continent was the part people came for, and it is the part that made HyTelnet an actual map of the pre-web internet rather than a set of bookmarks.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

Earl Fogel wrote the client, and the shape of it is the detail worth keeping. HyTelnet was not a service you queried. It was a program plus a database that you downloaded and kept on your own disk, and updating your copy of the internet's directory meant fetching a newer one. It ran on DOS as a resident program you could pop up over whatever else you were doing, and it was ported to Unix, VMS, the Amiga and the Mac.

The interface was a terminal menu driven with the cursor keys, with a flat-file index you could search. You picked a site, it showed you the address and exactly how to log in, and then you went and did that yourself in another window. It did not connect for you. It told you what to type, which sounds primitive until you notice that this is the same job a search result does now.

~ the day it stopped ~

Version 6.9 carries a program date of 11 June 1995 and a database last touched on 8 June 1997, and that second date is the real end. Nothing was announced. The web had arrived in the middle of the project's life, and one by one the catalogs HyTelnet pointed at either grew a web front end or went away, until the directory was describing a set of doors that no longer opened. A hand-maintained list dies when the maintaining stops being worth it.

Scott later put an HTML reconstruction online, and Floodgap runs a gateway that mimics the original interface in a browser, so you can still walk the menus. Most of what they point at is dead. That is not a flaw in the reconstruction, it is the actual historical record: a working index of an internet that has been switched off underneath it.

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