6 ms·

Hotline for modern Apple systems

519 points by tonymet 2y ago

codetrotter 2y ago
Does it support TLS? Or is everything unencrypted on the wire?
- melomac 2y ago
  Qba'g lbh jbeel, ebg13 jvyy cebgrpg lbh!
  - mckn1ght 2y ago
    ~?=J 2 ?__3 H@F=5?VE FD6 C@Ecf[ J@F =67E E96 4=F6 C:89E E96C6 :? E96 4JA96CE6IEP
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Terretta 2y ago
      tr '\!-~' 'P-~\!-O'
- amatecha 2y ago
  The unofficial *nix ports allowed some basic encryption but this was never supported by the original Mac (and later Win) clients. Since the protocol was plaintext, it was easily reverse engineered, thus "hx" was born :)
- V99 2y ago
  TLS did "exist" (well, as SSL), but this was a time when you'd maybe see it used on a few websites that had it on just the specific pages that took a credit card. It was well before most other protocols were worrying about the security or privacy of being intercepted at all. Decades before TLS by-default-because-why-not started becoming a thing (largely because of LetsEncrypt). Especially for an app that was mostly for pirating stuff. Your email and it's login/passwords, IRC, instant messaging, regular browsing, etc all happened in plain text. And despite the physical networks being super vulnerable back then. Ethernet was mostly connected by hubs/ring/shared coax, so every device received every other's packets. WiFi was just coming around and is a shared medium. Several rounds of inept security schemes failed to even keep people who don't know the network password from intercepting nearby traffic. Most networks didn't have security on yet anyway. The Hotline protocol was/is mostly binary messages sent over TCP with a 4 character text message type followed by a corresponding packed data structure of the related data. (https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Protocol#Session_Initialization https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Protocol#Session_Initializat...)
  - incanus77 2y ago
    > TLS did "exist" (well, as SSL), but this was a time when you'd maybe see it used on a few websites that had it on just the specific pages that took a credit card. Indeed, I had forgotten about this. You'd go from the regular site on HTTP to the credit card page on HTTPS and back again. For a time, it was important to check that the page that you were actually entering the card details on was on HTTPS before you clicked the submit, and that the target was also HTTPS.
- superkuh 2y ago
  Are you worried someone is going to MITM you? Hotline works just fine without encryption. That said, some people felt as you do even back in the early 2000s and the KDX server/client software set is basically Hotline with TLS. It was only introduced at the tail end of the scene though and not widely adopted. There are some servers that support both kdx and hotline clients.
VonGuard 2y ago
Hotline was the greatest single platform for the Macintosh in the 1990s. First Class was great, but Hotline was SO simple, you just pop in a tracker address, fire up the server, point it at 1 folder on your HDD and yer out there, as a pirate BBS server host on the internet hosting those brand new things, MP3's and those wildly hard to gather NES roms, or that illicit copy of Adobe Photoshop 4.5. Hotline took the AOL script kiddies from #Zelifcam and put them on the real big boy Internet without any restrictions or repercussions. It was glorious time. I still have a Big Red H necklace given to me by the I-forgot-his-name author of the platform.
- karlshea 2y ago
  I brought my whole Mac 6 hours away to my aunt's for Thanksgiving one year so I could download a bunch of bigger umm... items off of Hotline since they had brand-new stunningly fast several-megabit cable internet when I just had barely better than dialup ADSL at home. It was amazing.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    I did the same once, or similar - I took an external 500mb SCSI HDD to a family friend's office so I could load up stuff from my favorite servers at then-mind-boggling speeds, on their trusty G3 if I recall correctly. I couldn't believe how fast the transfers were! Definitely loaded up that drive hahaha :)
- SG- 2y ago
  Adam Hinkley was his name.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Hell yeah, it was the best. I still remember finding "Tempo/MacQuake Palace", which was the most glorious combinations of things I thought I could find - Mac OS Tempo[0] and the unauthorized Quake source port for Mac! Amazing stuff at the time. (on that note, wow, I have not heard "zelifcam" in a very long time! haha) [0] https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Mac_OS_Tempo_(pre-release) https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Mac_OS_Tempo_(pre-release)
jasoneckert 2y ago
I've never heard of Hotline, even though I was heavily involved in the Apple community in the 1990s, but according to the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications), it looks like a good-but-shortlived product that was killed from within: "However, a few months after Hinkley moved to Canada, he and his colleagues at Hotline Communications got into a major disagreement and Hinkley left the firm, encrypting source files for Hotline on Hotline Communication's computers, thus crippling the company."
- kennywinker 2y ago
  It was huge for a certain demographic… very-online teens who are interested in downloading punk and hiphop mp3s and maybe a keygen or serial number database or two. The community lasted much longer than the company, afaik - but was ultimately killed by easier ways of getting media - napster and then limewire and the like.
- inetknght 2y ago
  Hotline predated Napster. Hotline Client, Hotline Server, and Hotline Tracker. It was pretty damn cool. It had way more features than Napster ever did. It was amazing for black flagging with the first high speed^H^Has modem I ever bought, a good ole' 56k.
esafak 2y ago
Did it have any interesting features that are not available in today's products?
- kennywinker 2y ago
  I’d say it’s main feature was linking file sharing to community. Napster and the clones that followed it were efficient ways to move files around, but you didn’t get to (or have to) chat with people about their music collections while you did it - if i recall right, often servers were run as take a file leave a file, so if you had something good to exchange that was social capital
  - esafak 2y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Such rules (ul/dl ratios) have existed since the BBS era.
  - Mainsail 2y ago
    I may be making this up, but I seem to recall a chat feature on one of Napster, Limewire, or Kazaa.
    - ghotli 2y ago
      Soulseek is likely the one you're remembering. I remember talking to people with similar collections of music. Hotline was my primary passion for quite some time but soulseek had a longer run of utility in my childhood on the nascent web.
  - bradly 2y ago
    > if i recall right, often servers were run as take a file leave a file, so if you had something good to exchange that was social capital Often there was a requests directory in the top level with you would need to upload a requested album/program in order to get access to the entire server. There was also banner clicking to get a password, but that never worked tbh.
  - informal007 2y ago
chriscjcj 2y ago
Now how about Carracho?
- morphle 2y ago
  Those are my thoughts too.
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  I just remember I visited VersionTracker everyday looking for software. What a different world.
  - lampiaio 2y ago
    Oh my, I used to do that too! There was always something interesting being released, even if just some point release for the odd application.
    - tambourine_man 2y ago
      The though alone that software didn’t update itself and required the user to manually check a third party aggregator is crazy these days.
- amatecha 2y ago
  or KDX! :)
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    I remember that. I don’t remember how the two were related but the UI was very customized and futuristic. I loved that too.
    - amatecha 2y ago
      KDX was the followup to Hotline, made by the same guy IIRC, he made a new company "Haxial". and yeah it was quite nice!
mig39 2y ago
Excellent! I remember running one of these servers on my 2Mb/s ADSL connection in small-town BC :-) It was one of my first "online communities" that connected a bunch of us around the world.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Wow nice, are you familiar with one of the still-running servers also based out of BC, "Higher Intellect"? Does it ring a bell at all? It's one of the longest-running servers, started in 2001 or so, still up and active today with the same files since then.
  - cactusplant7374 2y ago
    I used to hang out there all the time. There was also the Calwell RPG server. A few dudes working on an online game. There was a beta but it never got off the ground.
amatecha 2y ago
Hotline was life-changing software for me. It was pretty niche, being Mac-only, and its BBS-like nature meant each server had its own culture and "cliques" and community. Getting an account on certain servers (rather than being a lowly guest) was a noteworthy moment. I remember a couple really badass servers like one called "JADE: where some guys in a university hosted a Hotline server on the uni's insanely fast connection. I want to say it was an OC-12 connection (600mbit)? This was in like, 1998. I still have a few friends from those days, one of whom I talk to almost every day. Unfortunately one friend I met on Hotline passed away unexpectedly this past July. I never would have expected to be making decades-long connections when I was just a kid looking for "filez" to download. <3 Actually that same friend gifted me his old PC which was my first Windows machine. An amazing and kind gesture which changed the course of my life (I had grown up only with Macintosh systems until then). Further, I found music on Hotline that I would never have found otherwise. I didn't find much on IRC (didn't know where to look) but I made connections with people on Hotline which resulted in me being exposed to amazing music from all over the world -- another life-changing experience. Too awesome :)
- mikae1 2y ago
  > being Mac-only I was an avid Hotline user at the time and connected via Windows. Was there third party clients? Vague memories... Today I'm on Linux and just found out there's a FOSS Qt client updated just hours ago... https://github.com/tjohnman/Obsession https://github.com/tjohnman/Obsession
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Hotline got official Windows clients after a year or so! I remember feeling a bit salty that our insular club suddenly had _intruders_ hahaha :) but yeah and around that time people started reverse-engineering the protocol (since it was plaintext) and a linux/BSD client "hx" was written. There are many unofficial clients: https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php Wow I didn't know Obsession was still being updated, that's awesome! thanks for letting me know lol
  - Washuu 2y ago
amatecha 2y ago
After many years the domain of the default tracker built into the client, hltracker.com, expired... Someone in the community snapped that up and is hosting a new tracker at the same address, so when you fire up the original Hotline clients on an old computer or VM, it still works just as if it's 1997 again. Pretty sweet! There are quite a few active servers still.
CountHackulus 2y ago
Hotline was an amazing experience when I was younger. Really taught me a lot about devops and about ISPs.
- bobbob1921 2y ago
  Same! Managing servers with multiple external hard drives/scsi IDs !
nico 2y ago
Whoa, I think I remember using something like this on BeOS a looong time ago Quick googling, it might have been SilverWing: https://preterhuman.net/software/silverwing-beos/ https://preterhuman.net/software/silverwing-beos/ Super cool, downloaded and kinda lost now, but excited to explore
- amatecha 2y ago
  Coincidentally that site you just linked also hosts one of the longest-running Hotline servers still online: https://preterhuman.net/server.php https://preterhuman.net/server.php / https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php :) (server address is hl.preterhuman.net )
  - nico 2y ago
    Amazing. Interesting file names on hl.preterhuman.net. Wow, Java games for Nokia phones! This is so cool. Thank you
    - amatecha 2y ago
      Cheers!! Yeah, this server has been collecting stuff for a very long time, and people have contributed lots of neat stuff. I'm not sure how many other servers have such a historical selection of files, probably not many!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- coolcoder613 2y ago
  Could it have been BeShare?
  - nico 2y ago
    Just checked it out, looks cool, but don’t remember using it Does it work on top of Hotline as well? Do you know if there is a current version for Mac? Would love to try it out
seydor 2y ago
I remember running hotline in windows. Maybe the server was macos-only?
- amatecha 2y ago
  It started out as Mac-only, but they later made Windows versions of the client and server (and tracker)! :)
electroly 2y ago
The readme mentions servers and trackers. I also remember a tracker tracker, for finding trackers. What an exciting time as a young nerd with no money and a lot of spare time.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Yeah, that's exactly what the site was! https://web.archive.org/web/19991011173529/http://tracker-tracker.com/hotline/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991011173529/http://tracker-tr... :)
- einsteinx2 2y ago
  Now I wonder if the term “tracker” used for BitTorrent originated from Hotline…
iJohnDoe 2y ago
Spent so much time on Hotline. Was truly awesome.
JeremyHerrman 2y ago
As a 14 year old in 1998, I was the sole computer user in my family and my parents wouldn't let me have internet access. Of course, that didn't stop me and I used ad-supported free ISPs like K-mart Blue Light (yes, K-Mart had an internet service!) and Freeinet to dial in when my parents were asleep and download files from Hotline. I used ResEdit to hack the client binary and make the ad windows minimizable :) What a thrill it was to connect to a fast server and download the blazing speed at 3KB/s. Getting access to a new Hotline server could be involved. Some came with instructions to visit a set of web pages (each with ads), copy a specific letter from each site and put them all together to get the server password. Once you were in the server, you never knew what you would find. Hotline is where I downloaded a lot of warez (like adobe products) but some servers had really strange and NSFW stuff - including the first snuff type images I had encountered. At some point, my parents would get clues that I something was "wrong" with their phone lines. Call waiting didn't work with modems so incoming calls wouldn't come through, and word got back about the issues. Luckily I was able to buy a product called "Catch a Call" which sat between the phone line and your modem, and when an incoming call was detected it would ring, and I would rip the cord out of the computer to let the house phone ring. I started going online more often while my parents were awake and I would just listen for them to hit the "talk" button on the 900MHz wireless handset and rip the phone cord out of my iMac as fast as I could so they wouldn't hear the modem noise through the phone. Sometimes when I wasn't fast enough, my mom would yell "Jer! Something's wrong with the phone!" and I would walk out, hit a few buttons to pretend I was fixing it, and hand it back (my mom would usually thank me for helping). She passed away a few weeks ago... I never told her about this deceit. Eventually around 2000/2001 they got a cable modem and life with broadband was very sweet.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Aw man, first off, my condolences :( Second though, I relate very well to your story! I definitely had some "dialed up when I wasn't supposed to be" times, enough that my dad once simply cut the phone line with a pair of scissors when I was caught chatting online at 2-3am _yet again_ :) hehehe .. I have more stories but I definitely won't record them here hahaha
curvaturearth 2y ago
This was quite a time! Hotline, Delta Tao's Clan Lord, mp3s. All on a 33.6k modem (or similar). Someone sent me a graphics library, Think Pascal and a few other things and I got tinkering with graphics way back then too. I believe it was this https://www.lysator.liu.se/~ingemar/sat.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/~ingemar/sat.html
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  I played Clan Lord quite a bit. A very peculiar game even for its time.
  - curvaturearth 2y ago
    It was! Or is.. it still exists and runs for free now I think
davidmurphy 2y ago
So cool to load HN and see this. I was on Hotline's founding team in the 90s that joined with Adam Hinkley to promote and grow Hotline -- here's a press release I wrote for Hotline's appearance at Macworld Expo SF '98: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Hotline_MacWorld_Expo_1998 https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Hotline_MacWorld_Expo_1998 (That site has lots more Hotline related archival stuff at https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Category:Hotline https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Category:Hotline ) Fun memories. We of course on the Hotline team used Hotline itself to keep in touch with each other around the world -- at that point, Adam in Australia and the rest of us across the US and Canada. Fun antics in the group chat. =) It was a really fun time. At its peak Hotline went on to be used by millions, and even by companies like Apple, GM, and Avid. I particularly loved the Toronto Star quote that called Hotline "a major force in the online world" at the time. These days I work for the Computer History Museum and have lots of Hotline stuff adorning my cubicle :) )
- chongli 2y ago
  Thank you! I used Hotline all the time back in the day. I loved it! I was a member of quite a few servers. I really miss the cozy feel of a private community like that!
rcarmo 2y ago
This is a lot of fun. I remember Hotline from the dial-up years, and how frustrating it was to use over slow connections, but also how much better and Mac-like it was than most BBSes.
sushidev 2y ago
I can relate to this coming from DOS and BBS systems this sounds very familiar. Though by 98 BBSs started to decline as people have been moving to use the internet instead..
soci 2y ago
I owned a Hotline server back in the day. Fun times! I ran it for three full years from my student shell account at my college’s HP-UX server. It was a T3 connection so it was faaaast as hell. It got completely unnoticed by the sysadmins… until it didn’t! They got so mad when finding out that I got my account suspended for months.
- SG- 2y ago
  what was it called back then?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tribby 2y ago
it was eye opening as a young person to learn how to change the path of a folder on a hotline server to ../ with a debugger
c22 2y ago
Just go to this URL and click the 2nd banner ad from the top. The password is the 16th word on the page.
- bobbob1921 2y ago
  Lol! I made quite a bit of money through middle school and high school with this foolishness and hl servers. I was even able to pay a friend of mine in another part of the town, a cut if he allowed me to run some of my hotline servers on his new cable modem (since that was the first part of town to get them). Also ran a server on a T1 at an office of another friends. Another blast from the past regarding hotline, figuring out how to name your hotline servers so that they appeared at the TOP of the various tracker lists. (And those app/server sounds!)
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I hated this soooo much… I had completely forgotten. Now I hate it again.
dep_b 2y ago
It seems there's a strong nostalgia for systems around the time the internet was still nascent, like the Slack client for Windows 95. I'm still baffled we could run ICQ on 16MB of RAM (maybe I had 64MB later on?) while multi-tasking with a browser and mail client, while each activity would consume around 1GB each on modern machines, except perhaps for some mail clients that are still running native code. And yes we got a lot more stuff in return like images and video, and I don't miss the noise of my HDD caching at every little PhotoShop edit I do, but when I read that Hotline could run on 10MB of RAM I'm really questioning what we're doing nowadays.
- 9dev 2y ago
  If you have moved between homes a few times, you’ll notice how you seem to occupy all available space eventually. It’s a good optimization strategy, I think. There’s just no reason to waste time tuning software for optimal efficiency if the users hardware is powerful enough they’d never even notice. Yes, that means software is less efficient than it was, old devices have more trouble running new apps, and doing a bunch of things at once hogs computers down faster—but for the majority of use cases, that is not a concern.
  - dep_b 2y ago
    I built some native apps for macOS recently and a 10MB installer with a below 100MB footprint after running for months makes me wonder what would happen if all of my apps were truly native.
    - pocketarc 2y ago
      macOS is the best platform for wondering that, too. Apple's ecosystem is incredible, all the APIs they provide, all the neat little native functionality you can build into your apps, all virtually for free, and a user base that cares about the quality of their apps and is willing to pay for it. There's no better platform for building a native app, in my opinion.
    - msephton 2y ago
      I built a modern equivalent of an old classic Macintosh app—Stapler—and the file size is roughly the same if you take unty account the fact my new app contains both Intel and Apple silicon architectures. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41216055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41216055
imaginationra 2y ago
I loved Hotline. It was one of my favorite things on the web back then. I chatted with/shared resources with other film/video/animation/audio types on a few great specialty servers back then. Have never found anything else like it since besides Retroshare for functionality but the UI/UX in Hotline is far superior.
armagon 2y ago
This sounds so interesting. Are there other all-in-one platforms? It reminds me a little of Citadel/UX (https://citadel.org https://citadel.org) or software for the Reticulum Network (https://reticulum.network/manual/gettingstartedfast.html#nomad-network https://reticulum.network/manual/gettingstartedfast.html#nom...).
- c22 2y ago
  Freenet has a similar vibe.
reaperducer 2y ago
Is there a way to use a monospace font in this client? A lot of the servers use ASCII art, but the client's default (only?) font is proportional.
tagban 2y ago
Hello everyone! Awesome to see the action and joining. I've been quietly working with Ari to ensure Hotline continues by maintaining the original domains required for clients to work. I also run http://hlwiki.com http://hlwiki.com and http://bigredh.com http://bigredh.com (designed to work with classic browsers) which links to all of the open source and closed source active projects surrounding hotline. Enjoy!
- tonymet 2y ago
  Thank you for keeping the spirit of Hotline alive. Despite innovations, nothing can replace the vibe of that era. Good to see Hotline carry on.
superkuh 2y ago
The hotline scene still exists in some form. The trackers are still up. Old clients still work even if new ones don't but it's nice to see some more development. I am actually connected to a hotline server right not using the HotlineClient 1.9.1 - Super Tracker Edition under wine. I miss the active days of the early 2000s Hotline communities though. Inverted Reality, Dark Nebula, etc. Anyone else here have a custom icon in the Badmoon pack(s)? I was/am Hotline icon: 3582 , ctrl-f12 "hammeregg" + #number in most clients once you've installed the pack.
tonymet 2y ago
It seems this post was embargoed for about a day. I had almost lost faith in Hackernews community for not recognizing the splendor of resurrecting Hotline. Glad to see this project get the admiration it deserves.
ornornor 2y ago
Ooooh I still remember the “Welcome to Hotline” sound that plate when you opened it. Just like Winamp’s whips the llama’s ass sound is etched in my memory. Simpler times online it feels like.
monocultured 2y ago
This tickles my nostalgic bone. I ran a Hotline server in parallell with KDX for many years. Came in handy when studying abroad and I wanted to access my files. KDX had screen control as well, which I used to freak my brother out by recording messages and having them play when he was asleep… Good times! I enjoyed having a "home" online where I could invite friends and strangers – it was so much friendlier than irc.

519 points by tonymet 2y ago

codetrotter 2y ago

Does it support TLS? Or is everything unencrypted on the wire?

melomac 2y ago
Qba'g lbh jbeel, ebg13 jvyy cebgrpg lbh!
- mckn1ght 2y ago
  ~?=J 2 ?__3 H@F=5?VE FD6 C@Ecf[ J@F =67E E96 4=F6 C:89E E96C6 :? E96 4JA96CE6IEP
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Terretta 2y ago
    tr '\!-~' 'P-~\!-O'
amatecha 2y ago
The unofficial *nix ports allowed some basic encryption but this was never supported by the original Mac (and later Win) clients. Since the protocol was plaintext, it was easily reverse engineered, thus "hx" was born :)
V99 2y ago
TLS did "exist" (well, as SSL), but this was a time when you'd maybe see it used on a few websites that had it on just the specific pages that took a credit card. It was well before most other protocols were worrying about the security or privacy of being intercepted at all. Decades before TLS by-default-because-why-not started becoming a thing (largely because of LetsEncrypt). Especially for an app that was mostly for pirating stuff. Your email and it's login/passwords, IRC, instant messaging, regular browsing, etc all happened in plain text. And despite the physical networks being super vulnerable back then. Ethernet was mostly connected by hubs/ring/shared coax, so every device received every other's packets. WiFi was just coming around and is a shared medium. Several rounds of inept security schemes failed to even keep people who don't know the network password from intercepting nearby traffic. Most networks didn't have security on yet anyway. The Hotline protocol was/is mostly binary messages sent over TCP with a 4 character text message type followed by a corresponding packed data structure of the related data. (https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Protocol#Session_Initialization https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Protocol#Session_Initializat...)
- incanus77 2y ago
  > TLS did "exist" (well, as SSL), but this was a time when you'd maybe see it used on a few websites that had it on just the specific pages that took a credit card. Indeed, I had forgotten about this. You'd go from the regular site on HTTP to the credit card page on HTTPS and back again. For a time, it was important to check that the page that you were actually entering the card details on was on HTTPS before you clicked the submit, and that the target was also HTTPS.
superkuh 2y ago
Are you worried someone is going to MITM you? Hotline works just fine without encryption. That said, some people felt as you do even back in the early 2000s and the KDX server/client software set is basically Hotline with TLS. It was only introduced at the tail end of the scene though and not widely adopted. There are some servers that support both kdx and hotline clients.

VonGuard 2y ago

Hotline was the greatest single platform for the Macintosh in the 1990s. First Class was great, but Hotline was SO simple, you just pop in a tracker address, fire up the server, point it at 1 folder on your HDD and yer out there, as a pirate BBS server host on the internet hosting those brand new things, MP3's and those wildly hard to gather NES roms, or that illicit copy of Adobe Photoshop 4.5. Hotline took the AOL script kiddies from #Zelifcam and put them on the real big boy Internet without any restrictions or repercussions. It was glorious time. I still have a Big Red H necklace given to me by the I-forgot-his-name author of the platform.

karlshea 2y ago
I brought my whole Mac 6 hours away to my aunt's for Thanksgiving one year so I could download a bunch of bigger umm... items off of Hotline since they had brand-new stunningly fast several-megabit cable internet when I just had barely better than dialup ADSL at home. It was amazing.
- amatecha 2y ago
  I did the same once, or similar - I took an external 500mb SCSI HDD to a family friend's office so I could load up stuff from my favorite servers at then-mind-boggling speeds, on their trusty G3 if I recall correctly. I couldn't believe how fast the transfers were! Definitely loaded up that drive hahaha :)
SG- 2y ago
Adam Hinkley was his name.
amatecha 2y ago
Hell yeah, it was the best. I still remember finding "Tempo/MacQuake Palace", which was the most glorious combinations of things I thought I could find - Mac OS Tempo[0] and the unauthorized Quake source port for Mac! Amazing stuff at the time. (on that note, wow, I have not heard "zelifcam" in a very long time! haha) [0] https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Mac_OS_Tempo_(pre-release) https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Mac_OS_Tempo_(pre-release)

jasoneckert 2y ago

I've never heard of Hotline, even though I was heavily involved in the Apple community in the 1990s, but according to the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications), it looks like a good-but-shortlived product that was killed from within: "However, a few months after Hinkley moved to Canada, he and his colleagues at Hotline Communications got into a major disagreement and Hinkley left the firm, encrypting source files for Hotline on Hotline Communication's computers, thus crippling the company."

kennywinker 2y ago
It was huge for a certain demographic… very-online teens who are interested in downloading punk and hiphop mp3s and maybe a keygen or serial number database or two. The community lasted much longer than the company, afaik - but was ultimately killed by easier ways of getting media - napster and then limewire and the like.
inetknght 2y ago
Hotline predated Napster. Hotline Client, Hotline Server, and Hotline Tracker. It was pretty damn cool. It had way more features than Napster ever did. It was amazing for black flagging with the first high speed^H^Has modem I ever bought, a good ole' 56k.

esafak 2y ago

Did it have any interesting features that are not available in today's products?

kennywinker 2y ago
I’d say it’s main feature was linking file sharing to community. Napster and the clones that followed it were efficient ways to move files around, but you didn’t get to (or have to) chat with people about their music collections while you did it - if i recall right, often servers were run as take a file leave a file, so if you had something good to exchange that was social capital
- esafak 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Such rules (ul/dl ratios) have existed since the BBS era.
- Mainsail 2y ago
  I may be making this up, but I seem to recall a chat feature on one of Napster, Limewire, or Kazaa.
  - ghotli 2y ago
    Soulseek is likely the one you're remembering. I remember talking to people with similar collections of music. Hotline was my primary passion for quite some time but soulseek had a longer run of utility in my childhood on the nascent web.
- bradly 2y ago
  > if i recall right, often servers were run as take a file leave a file, so if you had something good to exchange that was social capital Often there was a requests directory in the top level with you would need to upload a requested album/program in order to get access to the entire server. There was also banner clicking to get a password, but that never worked tbh.
- informal007 2y ago

chriscjcj 2y ago

Now how about Carracho?

morphle 2y ago
Those are my thoughts too.
tambourine_man 2y ago
I just remember I visited VersionTracker everyday looking for software. What a different world.
- lampiaio 2y ago
  Oh my, I used to do that too! There was always something interesting being released, even if just some point release for the odd application.
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    The though alone that software didn’t update itself and required the user to manually check a third party aggregator is crazy these days.
amatecha 2y ago
or KDX! :)
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  I remember that. I don’t remember how the two were related but the UI was very customized and futuristic. I loved that too.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    KDX was the followup to Hotline, made by the same guy IIRC, he made a new company "Haxial". and yeah it was quite nice!

mig39 2y ago

Excellent! I remember running one of these servers on my 2Mb/s ADSL connection in small-town BC :-) It was one of my first "online communities" that connected a bunch of us around the world.

amatecha 2y ago
Wow nice, are you familiar with one of the still-running servers also based out of BC, "Higher Intellect"? Does it ring a bell at all? It's one of the longest-running servers, started in 2001 or so, still up and active today with the same files since then.
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  I used to hang out there all the time. There was also the Calwell RPG server. A few dudes working on an online game. There was a beta but it never got off the ground.

amatecha 2y ago

Hotline was life-changing software for me. It was pretty niche, being Mac-only, and its BBS-like nature meant each server had its own culture and "cliques" and community. Getting an account on certain servers (rather than being a lowly guest) was a noteworthy moment. I remember a couple really badass servers like one called "JADE: where some guys in a university hosted a Hotline server on the uni's insanely fast connection. I want to say it was an OC-12 connection (600mbit)? This was in like, 1998. I still have a few friends from those days, one of whom I talk to almost every day. Unfortunately one friend I met on Hotline passed away unexpectedly this past July. I never would have expected to be making decades-long connections when I was just a kid looking for "filez" to download. <3 Actually that same friend gifted me his old PC which was my first Windows machine. An amazing and kind gesture which changed the course of my life (I had grown up only with Macintosh systems until then). Further, I found music on Hotline that I would never have found otherwise. I didn't find much on IRC (didn't know where to look) but I made connections with people on Hotline which resulted in me being exposed to amazing music from all over the world -- another life-changing experience. Too awesome :)

mikae1 2y ago
> being Mac-only I was an avid Hotline user at the time and connected via Windows. Was there third party clients? Vague memories... Today I'm on Linux and just found out there's a FOSS Qt client updated just hours ago... https://github.com/tjohnman/Obsession https://github.com/tjohnman/Obsession
- amatecha 2y ago
  Hotline got official Windows clients after a year or so! I remember feeling a bit salty that our insular club suddenly had _intruders_ hahaha :) but yeah and around that time people started reverse-engineering the protocol (since it was plaintext) and a linux/BSD client "hx" was written. There are many unofficial clients: https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php Wow I didn't know Obsession was still being updated, that's awesome! thanks for letting me know lol
- Washuu 2y ago

amatecha 2y ago

After many years the domain of the default tracker built into the client, hltracker.com, expired... Someone in the community snapped that up and is hosting a new tracker at the same address, so when you fire up the original Hotline clients on an old computer or VM, it still works just as if it's 1997 again. Pretty sweet! There are quite a few active servers still.

CountHackulus 2y ago

Hotline was an amazing experience when I was younger. Really taught me a lot about devops and about ISPs.

bobbob1921 2y ago
Same! Managing servers with multiple external hard drives/scsi IDs !

nico 2y ago

Whoa, I think I remember using something like this on BeOS a looong time ago Quick googling, it might have been SilverWing: https://preterhuman.net/software/silverwing-beos/ https://preterhuman.net/software/silverwing-beos/ Super cool, downloaded and kinda lost now, but excited to explore

amatecha 2y ago
Coincidentally that site you just linked also hosts one of the longest-running Hotline servers still online: https://preterhuman.net/server.php https://preterhuman.net/server.php / https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php :) (server address is hl.preterhuman.net )
- nico 2y ago
  Amazing. Interesting file names on hl.preterhuman.net. Wow, Java games for Nokia phones! This is so cool. Thank you
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Cheers!! Yeah, this server has been collecting stuff for a very long time, and people have contributed lots of neat stuff. I'm not sure how many other servers have such a historical selection of files, probably not many!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
coolcoder613 2y ago
Could it have been BeShare?
- nico 2y ago
  Just checked it out, looks cool, but don’t remember using it Does it work on top of Hotline as well? Do you know if there is a current version for Mac? Would love to try it out

seydor 2y ago

I remember running hotline in windows. Maybe the server was macos-only?

amatecha 2y ago
It started out as Mac-only, but they later made Windows versions of the client and server (and tracker)! :)

electroly 2y ago

The readme mentions servers and trackers. I also remember a tracker tracker, for finding trackers. What an exciting time as a young nerd with no money and a lot of spare time.

amatecha 2y ago
Yeah, that's exactly what the site was! https://web.archive.org/web/19991011173529/http://tracker-tracker.com/hotline/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991011173529/http://tracker-tr... :)
einsteinx2 2y ago
Now I wonder if the term “tracker” used for BitTorrent originated from Hotline…

iJohnDoe 2y ago

Spent so much time on Hotline. Was truly awesome.

JeremyHerrman 2y ago

As a 14 year old in 1998, I was the sole computer user in my family and my parents wouldn't let me have internet access. Of course, that didn't stop me and I used ad-supported free ISPs like K-mart Blue Light (yes, K-Mart had an internet service!) and Freeinet to dial in when my parents were asleep and download files from Hotline. I used ResEdit to hack the client binary and make the ad windows minimizable :) What a thrill it was to connect to a fast server and download the blazing speed at 3KB/s. Getting access to a new Hotline server could be involved. Some came with instructions to visit a set of web pages (each with ads), copy a specific letter from each site and put them all together to get the server password. Once you were in the server, you never knew what you would find. Hotline is where I downloaded a lot of warez (like adobe products) but some servers had really strange and NSFW stuff - including the first snuff type images I had encountered. At some point, my parents would get clues that I something was "wrong" with their phone lines. Call waiting didn't work with modems so incoming calls wouldn't come through, and word got back about the issues. Luckily I was able to buy a product called "Catch a Call" which sat between the phone line and your modem, and when an incoming call was detected it would ring, and I would rip the cord out of the computer to let the house phone ring. I started going online more often while my parents were awake and I would just listen for them to hit the "talk" button on the 900MHz wireless handset and rip the phone cord out of my iMac as fast as I could so they wouldn't hear the modem noise through the phone. Sometimes when I wasn't fast enough, my mom would yell "Jer! Something's wrong with the phone!" and I would walk out, hit a few buttons to pretend I was fixing it, and hand it back (my mom would usually thank me for helping). She passed away a few weeks ago... I never told her about this deceit. Eventually around 2000/2001 they got a cable modem and life with broadband was very sweet.

amatecha 2y ago
Aw man, first off, my condolences :( Second though, I relate very well to your story! I definitely had some "dialed up when I wasn't supposed to be" times, enough that my dad once simply cut the phone line with a pair of scissors when I was caught chatting online at 2-3am _yet again_ :) hehehe .. I have more stories but I definitely won't record them here hahaha

curvaturearth 2y ago

This was quite a time! Hotline, Delta Tao's Clan Lord, mp3s. All on a 33.6k modem (or similar). Someone sent me a graphics library, Think Pascal and a few other things and I got tinkering with graphics way back then too. I believe it was this https://www.lysator.liu.se/~ingemar/sat.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/~ingemar/sat.html

cactusplant7374 2y ago
I played Clan Lord quite a bit. A very peculiar game even for its time.
- curvaturearth 2y ago
  It was! Or is.. it still exists and runs for free now I think

davidmurphy 2y ago

So cool to load HN and see this. I was on Hotline's founding team in the 90s that joined with Adam Hinkley to promote and grow Hotline -- here's a press release I wrote for Hotline's appearance at Macworld Expo SF '98: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Hotline_MacWorld_Expo_1998 https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Hotline_MacWorld_Expo_1998 (That site has lots more Hotline related archival stuff at https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Category:Hotline https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Category:Hotline ) Fun memories. We of course on the Hotline team used Hotline itself to keep in touch with each other around the world -- at that point, Adam in Australia and the rest of us across the US and Canada. Fun antics in the group chat. =) It was a really fun time. At its peak Hotline went on to be used by millions, and even by companies like Apple, GM, and Avid. I particularly loved the Toronto Star quote that called Hotline "a major force in the online world" at the time. These days I work for the Computer History Museum and have lots of Hotline stuff adorning my cubicle :) )

chongli 2y ago
Thank you! I used Hotline all the time back in the day. I loved it! I was a member of quite a few servers. I really miss the cozy feel of a private community like that!

rcarmo 2y ago

This is a lot of fun. I remember Hotline from the dial-up years, and how frustrating it was to use over slow connections, but also how much better and Mac-like it was than most BBSes.

sushidev 2y ago

I can relate to this coming from DOS and BBS systems this sounds very familiar. Though by 98 BBSs started to decline as people have been moving to use the internet instead..

soci 2y ago

I owned a Hotline server back in the day. Fun times! I ran it for three full years from my student shell account at my college’s HP-UX server. It was a T3 connection so it was faaaast as hell. It got completely unnoticed by the sysadmins… until it didn’t! They got so mad when finding out that I got my account suspended for months.

SG- 2y ago
what was it called back then?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

tribby 2y ago

it was eye opening as a young person to learn how to change the path of a folder on a hotline server to ../ with a debugger

c22 2y ago

Just go to this URL and click the 2nd banner ad from the top. The password is the 16th word on the page.

bobbob1921 2y ago
Lol! I made quite a bit of money through middle school and high school with this foolishness and hl servers. I was even able to pay a friend of mine in another part of the town, a cut if he allowed me to run some of my hotline servers on his new cable modem (since that was the first part of town to get them). Also ran a server on a T1 at an office of another friends. Another blast from the past regarding hotline, figuring out how to name your hotline servers so that they appeared at the TOP of the various tracker lists. (And those app/server sounds!)
rbanffy 2y ago
I hated this soooo much… I had completely forgotten. Now I hate it again.

dep_b 2y ago

It seems there's a strong nostalgia for systems around the time the internet was still nascent, like the Slack client for Windows 95. I'm still baffled we could run ICQ on 16MB of RAM (maybe I had 64MB later on?) while multi-tasking with a browser and mail client, while each activity would consume around 1GB each on modern machines, except perhaps for some mail clients that are still running native code. And yes we got a lot more stuff in return like images and video, and I don't miss the noise of my HDD caching at every little PhotoShop edit I do, but when I read that Hotline could run on 10MB of RAM I'm really questioning what we're doing nowadays.

9dev 2y ago
If you have moved between homes a few times, you’ll notice how you seem to occupy all available space eventually. It’s a good optimization strategy, I think. There’s just no reason to waste time tuning software for optimal efficiency if the users hardware is powerful enough they’d never even notice. Yes, that means software is less efficient than it was, old devices have more trouble running new apps, and doing a bunch of things at once hogs computers down faster—but for the majority of use cases, that is not a concern.
- dep_b 2y ago
  I built some native apps for macOS recently and a 10MB installer with a below 100MB footprint after running for months makes me wonder what would happen if all of my apps were truly native.
  - pocketarc 2y ago
    macOS is the best platform for wondering that, too. Apple's ecosystem is incredible, all the APIs they provide, all the neat little native functionality you can build into your apps, all virtually for free, and a user base that cares about the quality of their apps and is willing to pay for it. There's no better platform for building a native app, in my opinion.
  - msephton 2y ago
    I built a modern equivalent of an old classic Macintosh app—Stapler—and the file size is roughly the same if you take unty account the fact my new app contains both Intel and Apple silicon architectures. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41216055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41216055

imaginationra 2y ago

I loved Hotline. It was one of my favorite things on the web back then. I chatted with/shared resources with other film/video/animation/audio types on a few great specialty servers back then. Have never found anything else like it since besides Retroshare for functionality but the UI/UX in Hotline is far superior.

armagon 2y ago

This sounds so interesting. Are there other all-in-one platforms? It reminds me a little of Citadel/UX (https://citadel.org https://citadel.org) or software for the Reticulum Network (https://reticulum.network/manual/gettingstartedfast.html#nomad-network https://reticulum.network/manual/gettingstartedfast.html#nom...).

c22 2y ago
Freenet has a similar vibe.

reaperducer 2y ago

Is there a way to use a monospace font in this client? A lot of the servers use ASCII art, but the client's default (only?) font is proportional.

tagban 2y ago

Hello everyone! Awesome to see the action and joining. I've been quietly working with Ari to ensure Hotline continues by maintaining the original domains required for clients to work. I also run http://hlwiki.com http://hlwiki.com and http://bigredh.com http://bigredh.com (designed to work with classic browsers) which links to all of the open source and closed source active projects surrounding hotline. Enjoy!

tonymet 2y ago
Thank you for keeping the spirit of Hotline alive. Despite innovations, nothing can replace the vibe of that era. Good to see Hotline carry on.

superkuh 2y ago

The hotline scene still exists in some form. The trackers are still up. Old clients still work even if new ones don't but it's nice to see some more development. I am actually connected to a hotline server right not using the HotlineClient 1.9.1 - Super Tracker Edition under wine. I miss the active days of the early 2000s Hotline communities though. Inverted Reality, Dark Nebula, etc. Anyone else here have a custom icon in the Badmoon pack(s)? I was/am Hotline icon: 3582 , ctrl-f12 "hammeregg" + #number in most clients once you've installed the pack.

tonymet 2y ago

It seems this post was embargoed for about a day. I had almost lost faith in Hackernews community for not recognizing the splendor of resurrecting Hotline. Glad to see this project get the admiration it deserves.

ornornor 2y ago

Ooooh I still remember the “Welcome to Hotline” sound that plate when you opened it. Just like Winamp’s whips the llama’s ass sound is etched in my memory. Simpler times online it feels like.

monocultured 2y ago

This tickles my nostalgic bone. I ran a Hotline server in parallell with KDX for many years. Came in handy when studying abroad and I wanted to access my files. KDX had screen control as well, which I used to freak my brother out by recording messages and having them play when he was asleep… Good times! I enjoyed having a "home" online where I could invite friends and strangers – it was so much friendlier than irc.