The TTY demystified (2008)

Seems like a crowd favorite, previous discussions here:

2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4062981 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4544318 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8094186 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064657 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631513 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571055

Anyone work with TTYs much? It's something that comes up from time to time and I think I always come away with a 70% understanding.

Say I have a server process and I want to be able to netcat onto an open port and have it expose a shell like experience. History, line editing, scrollback etc. I know ssh accomplishes it somehow, but it gets a local and remote process in between me an the remote bash process to set up some tty/pty magic.

What would I need to do to get something similar working?