AbsoluteTelnet was launched over a decade ago, and continues to compete strongly in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

by Jeff Goldman [April 30, 2008]

Brian Pence first created AbsoluteTelnet 13 years ago, he says, as a personal project just to learn socket programming. "I said, 'Okay, what I can open a socket to: how about the telnet server?'" he says. "So I started learning the telnet protocol, and then I started developing terminal emulators, and I thought, 'This is kind of fun!' I learned by doing, and AbsoluteTelnet was born."

Pence says he first shared the application with other people in the company where he worked at the time, before deciding to launch a website and start charging a fee. He chose to call his company Celestial Software, he says, because he and a friend had used the name back in high school when they wrote software for friends. And the company is still just him: it's a one-man shop.

In the years since its launch, the solution has expanded enormously—the most significant changes include the addition of SSH versions 1 and 2 as well as a wide variety of terminal emulations. "Everything I implement is a result of someone asking for it… AbsoluteTelnet has about ten different emulations that it does, and each of those was added as a result of some customer saying, 'It's great that you have those eight—how about adding this one, so my terminal is supported?'" Pence says.

From engineers to librarians
Pence says the solution, which he's seen installed on just about every type of Unix server imaginable, is inevitably used for a wide variety of applications. While smaller installations are usually "engineers or programmers or system administrators that have to connect in remotely and change some parameters or their web server that they have to do at the command line," he says, that's really just the beginning.

Some of Celestial Software's larger clients, Pence says, are car rental companies that use the software to connect checkout terminals to the host system—as well as libraries managing their card catalogs. "There's all kinds of legacy text-based systems that are in place that people still need to connect to, and they can't use telnet any more," he says.

Competitive advantages
One of the things that makes AbsoluteTelnet stand out, Pence says, is the levels of security that are supported within SSH. "Secure Shell supports advanced authentication, like smart card authentication where you have to actually have physical possession of the smart card in order to log in—and AbsoluteTelnet supports that," he says. "There are only a couple of others that do."

Within the next few months, Pence says, he'll release Version 7 of AbsoluteTelnet, which will implement FIPS, the Federal Information Processing Standards. "I'll be using a FIPS-certified cryptography library, which by extension makes AbsoluteTelnet FIPS-certified—so it'll be government-approved," he says. "That's just another step towards making it more secure."

Pence says AbsoluteTelnet's biggest competitor is PuTTY, which boasts the competitive advantage of being free. "PuTTY is a very capable terminal client, and if PuTTY had existed back when I started doing what I'm doing, I might not have ever gotten as far as I did," he says.

Still, AbsoluteTelnet does have some key differentiators, including its wide variety of terminal emulators and its tabbed interface. And while you can probably find a version of PuTTY in which someone has implemented tabs, and you can probably find another version with advanced authentication, Pence says, "there's no one version of PuTTY that does it all."

AbsoluteTelnet also supports 47 different character sets, including China's GB18030. "Internally, AbsoluteTelnet is Unicode, so any data that it brings in has to go through a conversion process," Pence says. "And a lot of people are using UTF-8 these days on their Unix systems, which is a Unicode-based character set—but there are still a lot of legacy encodings out there that people use."

License and support
Pence says the application now has about 100,000 paid users. The license fee, which includes free upgrades for one year, is $49.95. After the first year, registered users can renew at a 30 percent discount in order to receive ongoing upgrades.

And all support for AbsoluteTelnet is free—just send Pence an e-mail, or post a question in Celestial Software's online forums, and he'll response within a day. That kind of responsiveness, Pence says, makes a big difference for his users. "Most of the time, if someone has a bug, I'll be able to get the information I need from them on the forum, debug it, and have a patch for them within 24 hours," he says.

—End