Talking to SKYNET

Today I sent an IM to SKYNET...and SKYNET IM'ed me back!

Today the BetterExplained.com blog entry was A Simple Introduction To Computer Networking which started off:

Most networking discussions are a jumble of acronyms. Forget the configuration details -- what are the insights?

* Networking is about communication
* Text is the simplest way to communicate
* Protocols are standards for reading and writing text

Beneath the details, networking is an IM conversation.

My IM (Instant Message), human to computer, was a simple text communication using TCP via telnet. All I did was type:

% telnet google.com 80
hello?

and google.com replied "Bad Request"!
Then I tried:

% telnet google.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0

and google.com replied "HTTP/1.0 200 OK" and sent me the google home page html!
And when I IM'ed "GET /news HTTP/1.0" then google.com sent me the news!

It was kinda cool talking directly to The Google.