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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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!
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins 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 :)
1659447091 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> 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.
temp0826 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
mikae1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> being Mac-only
I was an avid Hotline user at the time and connected via Windows. Was there third party clients? Vague memories...
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
efnx [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
jarcoal [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Wow this triggered some neural pathways I forgot I had.
I remember using both of those clients.
Washuu [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> 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.
zmb_ [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
guywithabike [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
samps [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
cactusplant7374 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
aag01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Java animated development environment. Strange days.
davidmurphy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
so cool to hear how Hotline impacted you -- really cool.
VonGuard [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
SG- [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Adam Hinkley was his name.
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins 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)
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..
dep_b [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
msephton [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
9dev [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> 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.
rbanffy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
dep_b [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
msephton [3 hidden]5 mins 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
pocketarc [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
II2II [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
9dev [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
pocketarc [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
kstrauser [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
prmoustache [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
tonymet [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Arguments in favor of poor quality are always so convoluted.
guestbest [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Well, the systems had little to no security. Also the multimedia resolution was not very good
2OEH8eoCRo0 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
itomato [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A 1 MB webpage was rare even from Frontpage 98 or ColdFusion.
Is that enough for an ad today?
gecko [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
layer8 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
HiDPI isn't really a significant factor. Electron apps still use crazy amounts of RAM in 1080p. Same for double buffering I would assume.
dep_b [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
tagban [3 hidden]5 mins 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 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!
tonymet [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
c22 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I hated this soooo much… I had completely forgotten.
Now I hate it again.
jasoneckert [3 hidden]5 mins 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), 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
kennywinker [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
soci [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
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.
JeremyHerrman [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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
rcarmo [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
imaginationra [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
CountHackulus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Hotline was an amazing experience when I was younger. Really taught me a lot about devops and about ISPs.
bobbob1921 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Same! Managing servers with multiple external hard drives/scsi IDs !
nico [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Whoa, I think I remember using something like this on BeOS a looong time ago
Amazing. Interesting file names on hl.preterhuman.net. Wow, Java games for Nokia phones! This is so cool. Thank you
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins 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!
coolcoder613 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Could it have been BeShare?
nico [3 hidden]5 mins 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
coolcoder613 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
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..
mig39 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
electroly [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
einsteinx2 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Now I wonder if the term “tracker” used for BitTorrent originated from Hotline…
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.
> 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.
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins 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 :)
superkuh [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
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
cactusplant7374 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I played Clan Lord quite a bit. A very peculiar game even for its time.
curvaturearth [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It was! Or is.. it still exists and runs for free now I think
esafak [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Did it have any interesting features that are not available in today's products?
yoshamano [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
iwontberude [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It was a BBS with a GUI
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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). :)
esafak [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder if that's how oink's pink palace got its name.
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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
Mainsail [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I may be making this up, but I seem to recall a chat feature on one of Napster, Limewire, or Kazaa.
ghotli [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
esafak [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thanks for sharing. Such rules (ul/dl ratios) have existed since the BBS era.
informal007 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's like local Google Drive.
tonymet [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
iJohnDoe [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Spent so much time on Hotline. Was truly awesome.
tribby [3 hidden]5 mins 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
seydor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I remember running hotline in windows.
Maybe the server was macos-only?
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It started out as Mac-only, but they later made Windows versions of the client and server (and tracker)! :)
superkuh [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
reaperducer [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
chriscjcj [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Now how about Carracho?
tambourine_man [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I just remember I visited VersionTracker everyday looking for software. What a different world.
lampiaio [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
aorth [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
amatecha [3 hidden]5 mins ago
or KDX! :)
lampiaio [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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!
HN.zip
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 :) )
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 :)
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.
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
Wow I didn't know Obsession was still being updated, that's awesome! thanks for letting me know lol
I remember using both of those clients.
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.
To this day I’m grateful I stumbled across the Hotline software and the server.
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.
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.
(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)
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..
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 personally still value it, and I try to build super-efficient apps, but... I'm the minority. And I can understand why.
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.
I think that computers got faster so programmers got dumber.
Is that enough for an ad today?
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.
So rather than occupying main RAM they’re on the GPU RAM and main RAM just orchestrates.
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!)
Now I hate it again.
"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."
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...).
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.
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.
Quick googling, it might have been SilverWing: https://preterhuman.net/software/silverwing-beos/
Super cool, downloaded and kinda lost now, but excited to explore
(server address is hl.preterhuman.net )
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
http://www.raasu.org/tools/windows/download.php
Or is everything unencrypted on the wire?
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...)
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.
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). :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace
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.
Maybe the server was macos-only?
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.
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.