Hotline for modern Apple systems
20 comments
·February 6, 2025VonGuard
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
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.
SG-
Adam Hinkley was his name.
jasoneckert
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), 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."
inetknght
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.
kennywinker
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.
mig39
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.
codetrotter
Does it support TLS?
Or is everything unencrypted on the wire?
esafak
Did it have any interesting features that are not available in today's products?
yoshamano
Kind of. It was kind of like a community in a box. The server and client software were dead simple to use and could be run off of a potato. You would get a message board, live chat, and file sharing all in one package. Servers could be advertised on a Tracker that could be queried from within the client. I was a Windows and BeOS user at the time and spent a fair amount of time bumming around anime and music themed servers. Also ran into one or two servers with big "Coast To Coast AM" vibes. Fun times.
kennywinker
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
bradly
> 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.
Mainsail
I may be making this up, but I seem to recall a chat feature on one of Napster, Limewire, or Kazaa.
esafak
Thanks for sharing. Such rules (ul/dl ratios) have existed since the BBS era.
chriscjcj
Now how about Carracho?
tambourine_man
I just remember I visited VersionTracker everyday looking for software. What a different world.
morphle
Those are my thoughts too.
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