During the early days of Internet, telnet provided a way for the user to travel to,  and become part of, a remote computing system. It was a very important part of the net for research scientists and the commercial community who had to access the computing power and software residing on main frame computers.

Today mainframes are still a big part of the picture, but the Web and other protocols allow users to hook up with remote computers, many of with are servers residing on PCs. It's even possible to log on from one PC to another.

When you use telnet you are using software which allows you to log in to another computer and run programs on that computer. This is significantly different from gathering information from the computer.

In the case of gathering information, you are doing nothing more than viewing or retrieving copies of information stored on the computer. With telnet you might access a library catalog, access a database, run an engineering simulation, play a  game of chess against the host computer, or participate in a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) fantasy simulation.

In order to telnet to another system you will either need an account on the system  or will need to know the public password. Telnet is one of the suite of programs that was developed during the early days of the net and requires that you know at least a few basic commands. Telnet is probably not something that you will be  doing much during your newbie days.

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