I think the term you are looking for is “wardialer.” I never had an Apple ][, but I messed around with one a bit at a school I went to for a short time.
Good ol’ days of computing where you were forced to learn about them in order to use them.
Yeah, sortof. I don’t think we called it a wardialer exactly, because I had another program with it that would cycle through phone numbers checking to see if a PC picked up on the other end (rather than checking to see if a long distance code worked) and that was considered the wardialer.
In essence, though, yeah – a wardialer. 
1 Like
I think the term was made popular from the movie Wargames.
Definitely. I did actually get as far as finding a few unidentified computers that way, but I’d get a telnet (not ssh yet!) prompt and would never get much farther than that.
They were probably Telenet (unless you meant Telenet) or Tymnet connections.
Telnet connections are done through a network