[zenethian]

Their replies are only obtuse because you fail to see that you’re being made fun of for having such a ridiculous pedantic position about this. “Terminal” does not mean shell when you read the Telnet RFC. It means TTY. A human to machine interface. MUDs implement the Telnet protocol and provide a remote TTY. What’s running on the terminal is absolutely irrelevant.

[zenethian]

Can you show the exact line in the RFC or IANA port reservations that says it has to implement a shell login interface with the Telnet protocol if it’s on port 23? Because I can’t find it. Nothing says that anywhere.