18:40
what it was, was it was for if all you had was dialup access to a unix machine... not even dialup SLIP or PPP, but even more basic than that, just like, you dial up, you get dumped into an annex terminal concentrator or something and you get to log in to the host of your choice.
and you could run the server-side 'term' program on the unix machine, and you could run a client-side thing on your end, and then the two of them could multiplex lots of channels between them. and if you ran, say, 'telnet' on your local machine, but you set the right LD_PRELOAD, then the socket() and connect() calls that your telnet process saw, would be the ones that knew how to talk *through* the term multiplexing, to the server side, and it would make a TCP connection out from there.