OldSayings.info also has a text-mode BBS experience reachable through Telnet. It is designed to feel at home on both modern terminal programs and older computers using period-appropriate terminal software.
The connection begins deliberately slowly at approximately 110 baud. This gives the opening prompt a distinctly old-terminal feel and provides a simple, readable starting point before the BBS knows what kind of terminal has connected. By design, OldSayings.info Telnet can be relied upon to act as a source of current UTC date/time in 7-bit ASCII-format (followed by 0x0D, or CR). Systems without their own clock can use this to manually align their time reference.
After the initial date-time (at 110 baud), OldSayings.info then increases the tempo to 300 baud. If you're equipment is an older TTY or something that can't handle 300 baud, you may see a brief amount of "garbage characters." If this happens, press SPACEBAR to inform OldSayings.info that you want to remain at 110 baud. On doing so, the initial menu will be presented again at this legacy rate.
Reminder: set your terminal software to LOCAL ECHO OFF
The initial PRESS RETURN prompt helps ensure that the connected client
is using a CR-based input device (not LF) and has working keys. This is followed by a
series of terminal-related questions, to help dial in a "best experience" for the client session.
OldSayings.info Telnet aims to accommodate a wide variety of systems, from actual TTY (teletypes)
to 1970/1980 vintage PCs, to modern "DOS shell" style terminal connections.
The bootstrap questions cover such things as terminal type, display capabilities, screen size, color usage, and a "tempo" speed suitable to the hardware involved (which is often less than the actual connected baud rate). Once the bootstrap is complete, the BBS can present the Sayings and menus in a form better suited to the client you are actually using.
Terminal Protocols: ANSI (1981 IBM PC), VT100 (1978), VT52 (1975), PETSCII (1977) or "none of the above" TTY 7-bit ASCII (1963). The answer here depends on what your terminal emulation software supports. There are older 5-bit (BAUDOT) and 6-bit (IBM CTSS and 36-bit mainframes) systems, but for OldSayings BBS we've chosen to start our support at the 1963 ASR-33 (1 start bit, 7-bit ASCII data, 1 parity bit, 2 stop bit). The ASR-33 model was more widely available around 1965-1967 and remained on production until 1981. The original 20mA current loop version did not support CTS/RTS flow control. Even so, being more mechanical based, the interface was limited to a fairly low 110 baud rate. CRT-terminals began replacing teletypes right around 1970, but it took a few years to standardize conventions on how to programmatically move the cursor around on the display (to then construct "interactive menu" systems instead of constantly-scrolling text like older teletype systems). DEC's VT52 and VT100 models were affordable and their manual describes the "escape codes" for cursor movement (and effects like inverse, underline, bold); ANSI essentially formalized VT100 and added color-codes. Meanwhile, Commodore (CBM) established their own control codes (within their own semi-ASCII 8-bit character set) starting with the Commodore PET in 1977. Initially called CBM-ASCII, or C/G (or U/L), but now commonly called PETSCII.
Experience Threshold: Not exactly your baud rate, but related to that. The tempo-value specified here controls how fast OldSayingsBBS will throttle text-stream content to your system (including also escape sequences and control codes). Slower systems (e.g. under 2MHz) can get overwhelmed and dropped characters, even with flow control (especially as the screen becomes full and screen-scrolling must be used). Modest systems may be using multi-tasking and need to limit their terminal speed. Faster systems may just want a more casual tempo. There is a "secret" (not displayed) option 9 to specify a custom tempo-value rather than a traditional baud-rate.
NOTE: There is a TEST option in the "experience threshold" menu, that plays a "5-second horserace" to help dial in a stream-rate that is appropriate to your network-bandwidth and hardware configuration. A "tempo" can be too-low vs. too-high; the idea is to find a "sweet spot" where the horserace should finish being presented in about 5-seconds and visually look like a carnival style horse-race.
Screen Resolution: Generally your full screen size, minus any fixed-status rows. Modern systems can have large "virtual terminal sizes." Option 8 (other) supports up to 160x100 to be specified. For classic CRT-based terminals (with character generators), IBM had some models starting as early as mid-1960s, followed by DEC and CTC/Datapoint around 1970 (essentially "the 12-row generation" with some 15 and 24-row models). Affordable and commonly available options started with the DEC VT52 around 1975 (which essentially established the "80x24" text-mode standard). Inexpensive home computers didn't include crisp-font monochrome displays and instead relied on adapters to lower resolution television sets (where 40x25 was essentially the best viable resolution, although some systems had 22, 32, or 64 column modes). Modern systems with GUI, scrollbars, resizeable windows on high-resolution displays can essentially present "any-sized" terminal, with a font-size scaled to suit the eyes of the system operator. For older teletype systems, the number of rows effectively does not matter, but they used printers with up to 132 columns (while 72 and 80 were other common printer-columns). Throughout the 1980s there were also low-power portable systems that commonly used 40x8 LCD panels (some calculator-style systems had single row LCD but often with an attached-printer option; the Sharp PC-5000 featured an 80x8 panel).
Character Set: For non-PETSCII clients, a few character set options are available. CP437 is a style most 1980s/1990s PC systems supported. For more modern systems, UTF-8 is often used as an encoding for Unicode text. Alternatively, one can also stick with 7-bit ASCII (while still using ANSI for color and cursor navigation).
Telnet is only the transport, while terminal software interprets the streamed bytes (generally just passing-thru plain-text, but also interpreting escape-codes for cursor movement or color changes). The machine on the other end might expect ANSI, VT-style control sequences, PETSCII, plain ASCII, a narrow 40-column display, or a modern 80-column terminal. Presing RETURN at the initial prompt goes through a "bootstrap sequence" that ask questions about your equipment configuration. This allows the OldSayings BBS to then present content in a form suitable to a variety of systems across decades of computing.
As a faster alternative to using the prompted menus, you can instead press ESCAPE at the initial prompt and specify a string that indicates your configuration. This string can be manually typed or issued by a macro if your terminal software supports that. As a few example strings:
"ANSI,80x25,CP437,115200" (IBM PC)
"ANSI,80x25,IBM,100000" (IBM PC; the tempo can be "any value" and does not need to be a traditional baud rate)
"VT100,80x30,CP437,57600" (PC with MDA, or some non-color display)
"ANSI,160x40,UTF8,telnet" (modern telnet using a large window)
"PETSCII,40x25,9600" (C64; once you specify PETSCII or CBM, then CP437/UTF8 is no longer an option)
"CBM,40x25,9600" (C64; CBM is interpreted as meaning PETSCII, you can also specify CG or U/G)
"ASCII,132x66,110" (TTY printer, such as from ASR-33; once you specify ASCII upfront, then 7-bit ASCII is also the expected character set)
Press RETURN or type HELP at the "specify" prompt to see additional notes and examples. Basically, the terminal-type is expressed first (ANSI | VT100 | VT52 | PETSCII). If you specify PETSCII (for CBM control codes instead of ANSI escape sequences), then use of the PETSCII character set is also assumed. Instead of "PETSCII" you can also specify "CBM". After the terminal type is the screen size you want to use (minimum is about 22x20, maximum is about 160x50) in COLUMN x ROW order. The third column is the character type: CP437 | UTF8 | ASCII (or if you already specified PETSCII terminal, then this argument is ignored). If you don't remember CP437, then alternates to that are "IBM" or "PC". The last parameter is the tempo-rate (related to the baud rate but dialed more towards "a data stream rate that doesn't overwhelm your terminal software and hardware", mostly pertinent to the Slideshow). A tempo value between about 50 and 1,000,000 is valid, or specify "telnet" for essentially uncapped full throttle.
The following section is intended as a practical connection notebook: which Telnet clients have been tried, what terminal mode was selected, and which BBS bootstrap answers produced the best results.
XCOMM for Commander X16
PETSCII or ANSI/CP437 (either can be 80-col or 40-col)
Windows TELNET.EXE
(works, use "chcp 437" first; but has "burst stream" issues - might need to set the tempo to 9600 or else the burst-mode issue still loses characters!)
MSYS2(Cygwin) Telnet
ANSI/VT100, can do like 100x50, and use UTF-8
ZOC 9.X
xterm (UTF-8)
NetRunner
Works fine, ANSI and CP437, 80x25 (ALT-H to hangup, ALT-X to exit)
TERMinator (iPhone App)
Works fine, ANSI and CP437, up to 160x50