[LAU] Why telnet for communication between applications?

[Ken Restivo]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:23:12AM +0100, andy baxter wrote:
> Crypto wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > reading recent posts concerning telnet there is one thing I have not yet 
> > understood:
> >
> > Why would I use telnet for interprocess communication rather than e.g. 
> > transmitting commands between two applications via software MIDI ports ?
> >
> > Is it (much) faster? Or do I get less protocol overhead, or...?
> >
> > Thanks for shading some light on this,
> > Crypto.
> Telnet is a bit of a misnomer anyway - it refers to using TCP socket 
> streams on a particular numbered port (23) to log in remotely to another 
> machine, whereas socket streams are more general than this and can be on 
> any port and have any higher level protocol embedded in them.
> 
> I.e. Telnet uses TCP sockets, but sockets aren't always used for telnet. 
> (E.g. http and ftp also use TCP sockets).
> 

Moore's Law?

In the 1980's a lot of protocols were binary, and designed for use over slow serial links. Nowadays, it seems like new protocols are mostly text-based and descended from HTTP or other Internet RFC's.

-ken