i had a dream about hotline the other night and found this gem. It was like a mix of discord and usenet, with awesome MacOS-9 style toolbars and multiple windows. I was glad to see someone reincarnating Hotline.
I was using macs in the earlier nineties to dial up BBSs. Never heard of Hotline! It looks a lot like a BBS, features-wise, but with a native GUI rather than ANSI terminal for clients. Oh, and over the internet.
An anecdote from those times was that students had to copy the client from a public SMB share and run locally, while the teachers and admins ran it from the share directly with write permissions. The effect was that any messages or attachments they opened would write into temp files on that share yet those got world read permissions. So you could just scan/scrape that folder and get all the dish on who was flirting with whom or uncensored opinions on various students, password change responses, exams, …
i share the sentiment . it’s a tough market to compete in, with lots of strong competition for messaging . And the demand for file-sharing forums is a bit niche given the rise of movie & music streaming.
It was an artifact of it’s day. I have fond nostalgia of the hype over file sharing forums. It felt like magic.
Yeah… I worked at a small brick & mortar computer store in the late 90s/early 00s and we had one customer who would absolutely rave about Hotline all the time. I moved away to go to university in 2002 and shortly after that saw in the newspaper that he’d been arrested for what we would now call CSAM.
oh my god, hotline! I had completely forgotten about it. Had lots of fun with it back in high school.
i had a dream about hotline the other night and found this gem. It was like a mix of discord and usenet, with awesome MacOS-9 style toolbars and multiple windows. I was glad to see someone reincarnating Hotline.
This looks fun. Has anyone who didn’t use macs in the 90s ever used this? ;)
you had to have been there it was glorious.
I was using macs in the earlier nineties to dial up BBSs. Never heard of Hotline! It looks a lot like a BBS, features-wise, but with a native GUI rather than ANSI terminal for clients. Oh, and over the internet.
comparing hotline to bbs is like comparing zune to ipod. Different community, different vibe.
Looks like it’s cross-platform: https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php
I doubt that’s an exhaustive list of clients. And there was a successor protocol, KDX? How did I miss this??
I didn’t use hotline, but lots of schools and local government used FirstClass which had similar vibes, dialup included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass#/media/File:FirstClass_GLFN_desktop.png
An anecdote from those times was that students had to copy the client from a public SMB share and run locally, while the teachers and admins ran it from the share directly with write permissions. The effect was that any messages or attachments they opened would write into temp files on that share yet those got world read permissions. So you could just scan/scrape that folder and get all the dish on who was flirting with whom or uncensored opinions on various students, password change responses, exams, …
Reminds me of Scour (out of UCLA) but with more general file utility
Very cool! I wonder why this not more widely known and the software stopped being maintained
i share the sentiment . it’s a tough market to compete in, with lots of strong competition for messaging . And the demand for file-sharing forums is a bit niche given the rise of movie & music streaming.
It was an artifact of it’s day. I have fond nostalgia of the hype over file sharing forums. It felt like magic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications#History has some hints
Yeah… I worked at a small brick & mortar computer store in the late 90s/early 00s and we had one customer who would absolutely rave about Hotline all the time. I moved away to go to university in 2002 and shortly after that saw in the newspaper that he’d been arrested for what we would now call CSAM.
Blast from the past!!
oh my god. I loved hotline so much!