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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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..
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.
> 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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."
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.
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.
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!)
Readit News
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 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.
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.
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.
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 personally still value it, and I try to build super-efficient apps, but... I'm the minority. And I can understand why.
Is that enough for an ad today?
I think that computers got faster so programmers got dumber.
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.
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?
So rather than occupying main RAM they’re on the GPU RAM and main RAM just orchestrates.
"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."
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.