Using the SDF UNIX System

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I have been fortunate enough to have had graphical user interfaces for my entire life. I don't really like using the command line that much, I don't know why. Probably because the memorization aspect is hard for me. Especially learning how to use all the text commands. However, the more I get into coding, the more important I realize these systems are. At school, we did some exercises with using UNIX, but other than that, I was coming into this as a complete outsider.
Enter the SDF (Super Dimension Fortress) Public Access UNIX System.
When I first visited the SDF, I was really excited. There was so much stuff with that old retro jank charm. I spent a few hours on the website, just looking at everything. But then I found ASCII Games. This required you to use SSH, and at this point, I knew what I wanted to do.
So… I downloaded PuTTY, made an account, and logged in. This was my experience, coming from someone who usually avoids UNIX and CLI.

When I logged in, this was the first thing I saw:

Validation doesn't really matter right now, as I'm just exploring. After that, I got some cool, random pieces of information, such as server uptime, the moon phase, and the guestbook:

After that, I got to select what I wanted to do. First, I checked out the games. There are quite a few to choose from. At first, I checked out Connect 4, because I felt like that would be the easiest. I got my butt handed to me by the computer:

I am very bad at this. No matter how hard I tried, I could not win against the computer player. So, I decided to play Tetris instead. My score was 2306. The controls started to make my hand cramp up. Also, there weren't many of the modern features, such as ghost periods, and whatever the Tetris version of coyote time is. Anyway, that's enough of the games. I wanted to check out some of the other things I could do.
I decided to look at stock quotes, because, why not? However, I couldn't get this to work. Whenever I tried, all I got was a list of statistics, missing the statistics themselves.

Trying to add on additional parameters to my command just gave me the same message. But, oh well. I'm not here to check up on the stocks anyways.
After this, I decided to check out the bulletin boards. I didn't know what one I wanted to look at, so I entered the one about pens. The bulletin board experience is quite charming. It's also quite focused. The best thing to compare it to would probably be like a TikTok feed, but without the algorithm. You only see one thing at a time.
The last thing I wanted to check out was the web browser. Looking at supported websites through this web browser is really cool. It's just Lynx, and this is my second time using it, but still cool. Here is an example of a website that actually worked for it. This was a joke page:

After this, I wanted to see what my website would look like in this. This is what Google looks like:

And this is what the search results for my website look like:

However, trying to actually visit my website gave me this error:

So… that was a little disappointing. Anyways, after this I decided to logout.

So… that was fun and cool. It was easier than I thought it would be, but not at the same time. However, this is probably because I didn't do much, and most of the stuff I did were just apps, nothing really UNIX related. I find it crazy that this is just what computers used to be like, but that's just what people were used to. And its not like everyone used computers, especially like now. I would like to come back to this in the near future, as there is likely a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't explore.

If you are looking to explore the SDF, here are some links that I think you would find helpful:

Tilde - Directory of sites SDF members created. Really fun to explore
Tutorials for General Use of SDF
Download PuTTY - Helpful client that you will most likely need on Windows