[mds]

Oh man, I have the same memory. Back in ‘92 or ‘93, in addition to the “^]” telnet trick, our local dial up gopher could launch vi sessions for sending emails which they hadn’t thought to lock down to prevent it from executing “sh”. Poking around in those university systems was my first exposure to Unix and I’d say pretty directly influenced my career path.

So, thanks telnet!

[hinkley]

My roommate volunteered as the webmaster for a non-profit, and they had a little tool that gave him vi access but no shell access.

Apache won't serve certain files unless the permissions are just so, and he could not get them to fix them or give him a shell to do it himself. So he couldn't do his job.

I ended up telling him about the shell escape trick.