CONNECT FROM YOUR OWN MACHINE

The in-browser terminal is a convenience. For the real experience, talk to the server over raw TCP yourself. It's on voyager1.v9n.us:4242.

Linux / macOS: netcat

Most Linux distros ship OpenBSD nc:

echo 'STATUS' | nc -q 1 voyager1.v9n.us 4242

macOS ships BSD nc, which has no -q:

echo 'STATUS' | nc -w 2 voyager1.v9n.us 4242

Not sure which flavor? Detect automatically:

if nc -h 2>&1 | grep -q -- '-q'; then NC_ARGS="-q 1"; else NC_ARGS="-w 2"; fi
echo 'STATUS' | nc $NC_ARGS voyager1.v9n.us 4242

Windows: PowerShell

Stock Win10 / Win11, no install required. nc isn't available in cmd or PowerShell, but you can use the .NET TcpClient class:

$client = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient("voyager1.v9n.us", 4242)
$client.ReceiveTimeout = 3000
$stream = $client.GetStream()
$cmd = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes("STATUS`r`n")
$stream.Write($cmd, 0, $cmd.Length)
$buf = New-Object System.IO.MemoryStream
$chunk = New-Object byte[] 4096
try {
  while ($true) {
    $n = $stream.Read($chunk, 0, $chunk.Length)
    if ($n -le 0) { break }
    $buf.Write($chunk, 0, $n)
    $text = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($buf.ToArray())
    if ($text -match "`n\.`r?`n") { break }
  }
} catch [System.IO.IOException] { }
$client.Close()
[System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($buf.ToArray())

If you have WSL installed, prefer that — it gives you a real nc:

wsl -- bash -c "echo STATUS | nc -q 1 voyager1.v9n.us 4242"

Python (anywhere Python runs)

python3 -c '
import socket
s = socket.create_connection(("voyager1.v9n.us", 4242), timeout=5)
s.sendall(b"STATUS\r\n")
s.settimeout(3)
buf = b""
try:
    while True:
        c = s.recv(4096)
        if not c: break
        buf += c
        if b"\n.\r\n" in buf or b"\n.\n" in buf: break
except socket.timeout: pass
s.close()
print(buf.decode("ascii", errors="replace"))
'

Interactive: telnet

If you just want to poke around by hand:

telnet voyager1.v9n.us 4242

Ctrl-] then type quit to exit (or type QUIT at the prompt — the server closes the connection cleanly).

The protocol

• No HELP, no ?, no menu.
• Try STATUS first. Then DSN LINK, INST LIST, FDS MEM, LOG 20.
• Unknown command → ?CMD. Bad args → ?SYNTAX. Don't panic.
• Multi-line replies end with a line containing just . (SMTP-style).
• Full command grammar: commands.md.

Let Claude Code drive

Install the Claude Code Skill — it knows the protocol and the transport quirks, and echoes the exact shell command it used so you still learn while it drives. Instructions in the project README.

Curious what the skill actually tells Claude to do? See the skill's transports reference — it's the imperative version of this page, written for Claude rather than humans.