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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, fi

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)
- rhaksw 2y ago
  > "Tempo/MacQuake Palace" Confession: I ran that. Sorry, Apple– that was wrong! If I recall correctly, I'd grab the latest version from a private Hotline site, then re-host it on my public server backed by a cable modem, whose name you got right. I loved Quake too. I'm not sure that all was healthy at the time, and I like to imagine I'm over such distractions, but here I am..
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Ah man, that's amazing. It's insanely cool to hear from you! Thank you for hosting!! It's such a strong memory for me, hopping on Hotline and finding just how much amazing stuff was on there -- your server is one of very very few I remember the name of! I was so excited to try a pre-release version of Mac OS and even moreso a port of Quake for Mac! I had first played the demo/beta while I was taking a course at the local university, but I didn't have any Windows machine at home so it was SO LONG before I could play Quake. I was so thankful to be able to play, even with the brutal low framerate I had to suffer with on my Performa 5260/120. Yeah, I ran a server as well back then, definitely fun times (and great memories around all that), even if it wasn't something I could keep doing forever.

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)

rhaksw 2y ago
> "Tempo/MacQuake Palace" Confession: I ran that. Sorry, Apple– that was wrong! If I recall correctly, I'd grab the latest version from a private Hotline site, then re-host it on my public server backed by a cable modem, whose name you got right. I loved Quake too. I'm not sure that all was healthy at the time, and I like to imagine I'm over such distractions, but here I am..
- amatecha 2y ago
  Ah man, that's amazing. It's insanely cool to hear from you! Thank you for hosting!! It's such a strong memory for me, hopping on Hotline and finding just how much amazing stuff was on there -- your server is one of very very few I remember the name of! I was so excited to try a pre-release version of Mac OS and even moreso a port of Quake for Mac! I had first played the demo/beta while I was taking a course at the local university, but I didn't have any Windows machine at home so it was SO LONG before I could play Quake. I was so thankful to be able to play, even with the brutal low framerate I had to suffer with on my Performa 5260/120. Yeah, I ran a server as well back then, definitely fun times (and great memories around all that), even if it wasn't something I could keep doing forever.