Hotline for modern Apple systems | Hacker News Reader

Hotline for modern Apple systems

github.com

519 pointstonymet126 comments

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 (That site has lots more Hotline related archival stuff at 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 :) )

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!

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 :)

> 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

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

Wow I didn't know Obsession was still being updated, that's awesome! thanks for letting me know lol

> I was an avid Hotline user at the time and connected via Windows. Was there third party clients? Vague memories...

I have a copy of all the official Hotline Windows releases in my archive somewhere. I don't know why, but finding the server software for Windows back when it released was so incredibly difficult. It felt like it was being gatekept.

Not that I remember. But there was a Mac clone called Carracho, and a little later there was a cross platform clone called KDX made by Haxial. Those were the days.

Wow this triggered some neural pathways I forgot I had.

I remember using both of those clients.

so cool to hear how Hotline impacted you -- really cool.

Cheers -- thank you for shipping such amazing software at a time where the Mac was always "second class" or shunned from other communities. For once we had a seriously badass exclusive thing and it came at JUST the right time in my life. I have SO many stories, running my own servers, making friends, sharing my music and discovering new music from around the world (as I already mentioned), connecting me with people who influenced my career and interests...

Do you remember David Raufeisen ("FORTYoz")? I believe he created hx, if I recall correctly. It turned out he lived in the Vancouver area as well, and at the time I REALLY wanted to try Linux, BSD, whatever (and was asking for help on some HL server), and he gave me his personal phone number so I could call him and get help from him. It turned out neither of the two Macs I had were supported by ANY *nix variant (not even A/UX or anything), so I was out of luck, but I'll never forget his kind gesture, and my much-later realization of his significance in the HL community.

It was a life-defining piece of software for me too. As a teenager I found a server called “REALbasic Cafe” that inspired and helped me go from knowing next to nothing about programming to making my first money from shareware as a high school kid.

To this day I’m grateful I stumbled across the Hotline software and the server.

I had an identical experience with the REALbasic Cafe as a kid, down to eventually selling a couple of shareware projects. I wonder if we were there at the same time.

I hung out there as well but I found REALbasic hard to understand at a young age. It just didn't align with my mental model. Later, I discovered Ruby and had great success.

The Café was my second home as a rural teenager into Macs and programming at a time when no other kids were. The 90s being what they were, my mom even let me fly solo to meet other Café members at the old MacHack conferences (in Dearborn, Michigan!).

I have nothing but fond memories of the 90s Mac community. It really was a special time and place. I hope my kids find their equivalent of these spaces.

Me too! I learn so much about coding from that server in high school, it was definitely a formative experience, learning to code with other teens all over the country.

Spent a ton of time on Hotline servers in the 90s. I wonder if any of them still exist. I'd dearly love to be able to pop back into my teen self and mess around on one.

The REALbasic Cafe was huge for me, too. It was an amazingly positive community and I met so many awesome people. One of them sent me a link to this post! It's awesome to see other people still remember it, too.

Same here, Hotline was just at the perfect time to have an (embarrassingly?) massive impact on my path. Less so the piracy aspect of it (though that sure opened my eyes to some possibilities with technology). I don't know if I would have got into Linux at all (at least not at such a young age) if I hadn't fallen into Badmoon (a popular? server at the time) and seen people in the user list with hx icons. Badmoon had a bit of a bad rap for silly things some of the members did, but as a 10-13 year old living in the sticks, meeting such an eclectic group (hackers, skaters, techies, artists) was revolutionary.

> and its BBS-like nature meant each server had its own culture and "cliques" and community

Kinda took that part for granted at the time; "social media" these days makes me miss what we had back then.

I was in an area that had one of the first cable internet connections and ran a "nintendo fan community" server that morphed into a "console fan community". It was not the largest but close; there was no jumping through ad clicks to access more "rare" areas of the server, only filled request. Don't remember what I called it. But I do remember a couple of the mods started dating; I want to say by the time life caught up with me and I shut it down they had got engaged (not 100 sure), I remember it got pretty serious thou. I didn't keep up with them and wish I had now that I am older and can appreciate things like that more.

Java animated development environment. Strange days.

Wow, I totally forgot what it stood for - thanks for reminding me! I was just digging up the old snapshots of the site on archive.org . Were you involved in the project at all? I wonder if I still have any builds/files on any of my old MO disk backups from those days..!

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.

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.

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 :)

Adam Hinkley was his name.

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)

> "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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I guess that's really the thing - when a 2TB SSD is $100 and and 64GB RAM another $130... there's just not much ROI in trying to make the app more efficient. Your users won't care.

I personally still value it, and I try to build super-efficient apps, but... I'm the minority. And I can understand why.

And as a percentage of resources, modern apps aren’t necessarily awful. If your IDE takes a gig of RAM, that’s absolutely a lot, but it’s relatively 1.6% of that 64GB system.

Sure, it can add up, and we shouldn’t waste resources just because we can, but I’m not going to lose sleep trying to optimize it when the rest of my system still has the other 98.4% of RAM available for use.

Except most users aren't running a developper's machine and have less than 8GB of ram. I think there is also still an awful lot of laptop users with 1366x768 screen resolution as it was still the default res on cheapest laptops a few years back.

I see your point, but…

> 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.

…but users do notice. They notice that their browser is slow, 8GB RAM isn't enough, every app they download is multiple hundred megabytes or even multiple gigabytes. Only very rarely can apps justify being that large.

I build native apps and pick native apps over alternatives and the experience is much, much nicer.

Whether users could articulate what they're experiencing is a different question. The bad experience we're talking about had been normalised over the past 15 years or so.

> Whether users could articulate what they're experiencing is a different question. The bad experience we're talking about had been normalised over the past 15 years or so.

I could counter that by saying people have had unpleasant experiences with software before, too; being way too technical and non-intuitive is one of that.

But my point isn't just that users won't notice anyway, but optimising for that isn't a good strategy anymore—at least from the perspective of commercial software vendors. Performance tuning reaches a point of diminishing returns very quickly.

Optimising for older hardware might not be a good commercial strategy, but I still get a kick out of making my software nimble and fast.

I like to joke giving engineers fast machines is a mistake, that having them on 8GB dual-core Celerons would help optimise their software.

OTOH, it’s also a valuable strategy to give them now the machines that’ll be mainstream when the product is finished. That one I learned from Alan Kay and the Alto.

Arguments in favor of poor quality are always so convoluted.

Well, my apologies. Let me try to phrase it in less complicated terms:

Modern computers are very powerful. To make cool apps, developers don't have to work extra hard to make their apps super-efficient. Developers are very expensive, so companies do not letting them work on things longer than necessary if it will not earn them a lot of money. Most people buy apps for the things they let them do, not because they are very fast. This is why many companies don't make super-efficient apps anymore.

High quality doesn't mean more time. It's a mistake to think that quality is extra work that is done after the functionality is completed.

If built properly from the beginning, fewer resources will be needed, including developer time.

If we were to run with that analogy, it would be akin to saying that someone goes out to buy a new couch only to discover that they have to buy a new house in order for it to fit inside. That couch may, or may not, seat an addition person. Also, I doubt that many people would be able to occupy the space of a house that is over 1000 times larger (or a million times larger, if you bought your first house in the early 1980s).

Don't get me wrong: I recognize that there are legitimate reasons for some of the increased size of software. I am also willing to accept that some inefficiency is justified in order to improve the quality of life for developers. On the other hand, we should not be ignoring efficiency for the end user solely in favor of efficiency for the developer.

I actually just talked to a guy who bought a new house with a huge barn attached, so he could park his huge motor caravan in it. So, the analogy isn't too far fetched, IMHO.

> On the other hand, we should not be ignoring efficiency for the end user solely in favor of efficiency for the developer.

Neither do I. But the economic incentives are stacked differently.

I will say that a lot of that RAM is going to creature comforts that aren't about apps getting worse per se. For example, everything is running double buffered images and windows in HiDPI. The era you're talking about, applications were in charge of redrawing their window whenever you exposed their contents/tabbed back to them/etc. If they genuinely needed double buffering, they'd need to do it themselves, so apps rarely did. Plus side, less RAM, downside, you would get gray nondescript windows and redraw errors when moving and resizing windows. Nowadays, Windows/macOS/Linux instead keep double- (or even triple-) buffered copies of all that. Throw on all the HiDPI images and whatnot, and you've already used up more RAM just on that one thing than the old apps used to take. But you can tab between apps with full previews, and you don't get gray blobs and tearing when an app is overloaded. Other things, like 64-bit pointers, or static linking becoming a common way to deal with DLL hell (sigh), also add RAM, but are also solving real problems.

I'm not really defending all those decisions or anything, beyond that it's not simply a case of lazy devs or whatnot. We made trade-offs as a community that genuinely improved the user experience. I may not agree with all of them, but I get why they happened, and don't spend a lot of time wondering why we used to need fewer resources.

HiDPI isn't really a significant factor. Electron apps still use crazy amounts of RAM in 1080p. Same for double buffering I would assume.

I was always under the assumption that application windows were all rendered as separate layers on the GPU and the artifacts on older Windowsen were related to pre-GPU UI rendering.

So rather than occupying main RAM they’re on the GPU RAM and main RAM just orchestrates.

I read comments like this and I wonder “how do you know Al, this in enough detail to explain it so simply? What was your path from DSA1 to this? Or maybe happened earlier? Was it a thing of the times? Sometimes I with I was not a kid in the 90s or before to absorb the rawness of computing that must be so useful and unique to have today.

I say this and at the same time I feel like it must be rare in today’s ultra competitive and optimized software world to admit this sort of thing, am I alone? Am I the only ignorant?

A 1 MB webpage was rare even from Frontpage 98 or ColdFusion.

Is that enough for an ad today?

Well, the systems had little to no security. Also the multimedia resolution was not very good

Security and multimedia decoders really add up to a gig or more of memory? I doubt it.

I think that computers got faster so programmers got dumber.

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 and 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!

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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!)

I hated this soooo much… I had completely forgotten.

Now I hate it again.

This sounds so interesting.

Are there other all-in-one platforms?

It reminds me a little of Citadel/UX (https://citadel.org) or software for the Reticulum Network (https://reticulum.network/manual/gettingstartedfast.html#nom...).

Freenet has a similar vibe.

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.

what was it called back then?

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.

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

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.

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

Same! Managing servers with multiple external hard drives/scsi IDs !

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.

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.

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/

Super cool, downloaded and kinda lost now, but excited to explore

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/gethotlinekdx.php :)

(server address is hl.preterhuman.net )

Amazing. Interesting file names on hl.preterhuman.net. Wow, Java games for Nokia phones! This is so cool. Thank you

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!

Could it have been BeShare?

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

The main client is only for Haiku, but there is an old windows client that can probably be run in wine. It uses a protocol called MUSCLE.

http://www.raasu.org/tools/windows/download.php

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.

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.

Does it support TLS?

Or is everything unencrypted on the wire?

Qba'g lbh jbeel, ebg13 jvyy cebgrpg lbh!

~?=J 2 ?__3 H@F=5?VE FD6 C@Ecf[ J@F =67E E96 4=F6 C:89E E96C6 :? E96 4JA96CE6IEP

  tr '\!-~' 'P-~\!-O'

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 :)

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_Initializat...)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, that's exactly what the site was! https://web.archive.org/web/19991011173529/http://tracker-tr... :)

Now I wonder if the term “tracker” used for BitTorrent originated from Hotline…

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..

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.

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

I played Clan Lord quite a bit. A very peculiar game even for its time.

It was! Or is.. it still exists and runs for free now I think

Spent so much time on Hotline. Was truly awesome.

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

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

Thanks for sharing. Such rules (ul/dl ratios) have existed since the BBS era.

I may be making this up, but I seem to recall a chat feature on one of Napster, Limewire, or Kazaa.

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.

> 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.

It's like local Google Drive.

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.

It was a BBS with a GUI

It was very much a "TCP/IP BBS". One unique feature was the "tracker", on which you could list your server. You could browse the servers, hop onto one (as long as guest access was on, or they'd have a login/pass in the server description), and there would be a user list, a chat window, a Files window, and a News window. Usually there would be people actively in discussion in the Chat. Indeed, many places require that you upload one of the "requests" to get an account with download privs. Others allowed guest download, but that became more rare over time. Each server had its own vibe/community.

There was an easter egg where you could press Ctrl-F12 and type in a "command" into the text entry box. These would unlock some special hidden functionality like changing your icon to one only available via that command (presumably for the devs of the software so they could have an exclusive user icon), or encipher your chat messages with a basic offset-substitution cipher. There were others that would restrict your chat to only saying "oink!" and turning your icon into a pig -- this was used as a prank to use on people "Hey dude if you press Ctrl-F12 and type fuelharp you'll get secret admin access!" (only to have them turn into a pig) :) Another Ctrl-F12 command would report your upload/download ratio into the chat - either a fun way to brag about your good ratio, or a good one to bait perennial leeches into typing so they'd inadvertantly reveal their pesky leeching ways!

Anyway, all in all a really fun place for a few years where it was "the" online destination for Mac users. I spent an ungodly amount of hours on there (and still hop on pretty often). :)

I wonder if that's how oink's pink palace got its name.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace

Vibes. Mac culture in the 90s was reactionary and distinct from PC culture. Remember the “I’m a Mac – I’m a PC “ commercials? Those were downstream of the Mac user culture.

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.

I remember running hotline in windows.

Maybe the server was macos-only?

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

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

Now how about Carracho?

I just remember I visited VersionTracker everyday looking for software. What a different world.

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.

The though alone that software didn’t update itself and required the user to manually check a third party aggregator is crazy these days.

Those are my thoughts too.

or KDX! :)

I remember that. I don’t remember how the two were related but the UI was very customized and futuristic. I loved that too.

KDX was the followup to Hotline, made by the same guy IIRC, he made a new company "Haxial". and yeah it was quite nice!

KDX's UI really was something else.

I remember first learning about torrents from a KDX server that had a folder with instructions on "how to download Matrix Reloaded at full speed". Downloaded some suspicious "BitTorrent" (I remember thinking the name was appropriate for what it promised) client along with a funny ".torrent" file"... and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the transfer speed use the entirety of my 256kbps connection.

Came here to ask the same thing. I started on Hotline and ended up on Carracho in the late 1990s. That orange icon!!! I used to tie up our house's phone line trying to chat with people and download things.

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