The classic internet talker,
reborn for the modern web.

What was a Telnet Talker?

Before social media, before web forums, before Discord — there were talkers. A telnet talker was a multi-user chat system that flourished on the early internet in the late 1980s and 1990s. Users connected with a simple terminal command and arrived in a shared text world of named rooms, colorful regulars, and real conversation.

No browser. No images. No algorithm curating your feed. Just a blinking cursor, a prompt, and hundreds of people talking. The culture was warm, witty, and deeply human. Friendships formed. Romances bloomed. People flew across countries to meet people they had only ever known as a name on a screen.

Talkers were accessible on any computer that had a telnet client — which, in the 1990s, meant nearly every university workstation and personal computer on the internet. At their peak, the most popular talkers had hundreds of simultaneous users around the clock, with dedicated communities that stayed together for years.

EW-too: The software behind the scenes

Most of the great talkers of the 1990s ran on EW-too, from Simon Marsh. EW-too was refined and extended into one of the most feature-rich talker codebases available, and it powered an entire generation of online social spaces.

EW-too gave talkers rooms, private messaging, emotes, shouts, mail, user profiles, and a permission system for moderators and administrators — a social platform complete in every meaningful way, built entirely from text. Administrators could customize room descriptions, ban troublemakers, and shape the character of their community entirely through configuration and culture.

These simple primitives — say, tell, emote, shout, look, who — were the vocabulary of an entire social world. Regulars developed personas, in-jokes accumulated over years, and rooms took on distinct personalities shaped by the people who called them home.

The Talkers that defined an era

Hundreds of EW-too talkers came and went, but a handful became legendary — known across the internet as the places to be. Many of the people who met on these talkers are still friends today.

These communities were vibrant and real. Users chose names and stuck with them for years, building reputations and relationships that outlasted the talkers themselves. When a talker went down, its community scattered — but the friendships rarely did.

Why does this site exist?

Telnet talkers faded as the web grew. Broadband arrived, social networks launched, telnet became a security liability, and the humble text terminal was forgotten by most. But not by everyone. The people who grew up on Foothills, Resort, and Surfers remember what it felt like: the thrill of a new tell, the warmth of a familiar room, the pleasure of a community that actually knew your name.

This is a modern revival of that experience — rebuilt from the ground up with current technology but faithful to the original spirit. No app to install. No account linked to your phone number. No algorithmic timeline. Just a browser, a login, and a community that talks.

The commands will feel familiar to anyone who spent time on an EW-too talker. ' to say something. : to emote. tell to whisper. who to see who's online. ? for help. The interface is intentionally minimal — the conversation is the point.

Whether you were a regular on the original Foothills in 1996, or you've never heard of a talker before today — you're welcome here.

But, why is it so "ugly"?

Fair question. Foothills doesn't look like a modern app — and that's entirely intentional.

The original talkers ran on Unix servers and were accessed through raw terminal emulators: VT100s, xterm windows, and whatever telnet client your university happened to have installed. There were no rounded corners, no drop shadows, no smooth animations. There was a black screen, a monospace font, and text. That was the entire experience — and it was enough.

Foothills deliberately recreates that environment. The dark background, the monospace font, the color-coded message types, the command-line interface — these aren't design oversights. They're the point. If it feels spartan by today's standards, that's because the 1990s terminal was spartan. The atmosphere was part of what made those communities feel different from everything that came after.

There's also something to be said for a screen with no distractions. No sidebar widgets, no constant notifications, no doom scrolling, no advertisements. Just the conversation in front of you and the people having it. The "ugliness" is, in its own way, a feature.