The Telix terminal interface. I spent so, so much time on it in the 80s, discovering BBSes, other people and later exploring the worldwide X25 network.

Also, from the page's source code:

// UUDDLRLRBA! var kkeys = [], konami = "38,38,40,40,37,39,37,39,66,65";

:)

I have a hard time finding information about Telix. How did this work, e.g. how would one "discover" other people?

Usually you'd find one BBS through word of mouth, and that one would have listings of systems which were hopefully a local number.

There usually had just the one line so users were limited to a certain number of minutes a day before they were no longer permitted to sign on. Sometimes a shareware game or new "Demo" would make to to a BBS and it might take you a week or two to download the entire thing because of time limits.

Some systems gave you extra time if you uploaded new content to encourage sharing. It was kind of a neat system, and I miss how small it was.

I think Telix was just one popular modem program of many.

Just Google for "BBS" i.e. bulletin board system.

They worked over phone lines. Normally you would know about one BBS from a computer magazine and then that BBS would have a megalist of other ones on it.

Telix[0] was just a terminal emulator, to find dial up systems you generally got information offline, such as via magazines or friends, and then got to know other systems from there, or from lists like the FidoNet node list.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telix

You would come upon a ZIP file and alongside its primary payload there would be one or more ads for various BBSes.

Sometimes the ads were the payload: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art#Scene

I am immediately reminded of "0208057040540" and "26245400080177". Those were, indeed, the days.

026245890040004 :-) Altger. Still remember it by heart. The brain is a strange machine.

and I recognized QSD immediately when I saw it in your post.

Oh, I remember QSD and Lutzifer! I was on there probably '90 to '91-ish?

Same time frame for me. I'd heard of the Internet (by way of "The Cuckoo's Egg" and coverage of the Morris worm) but being out in the boondocks with no college close by there wasn't any chance of getting Internet access at that time. The X.25 networks, and just the idea of always-on networked computers, were breathtaking to me.

Oh, I loved that book! Maybe I'll re-read it...

I found my way into some x.25-to-internet gateways in the early 90's. Most corporate networks were very insecure then. Some of those gateways had no authentication: you'd connect in over x25, then telnet out. The local colleges were also pretty bad.