Hotline Communications
Photograph by Ed Yourdonon Flickr.
In September 2001, Hotline Communications announced development of version 2.0 of the Hotline suite had communications been stopped, beta versions of which had not been well received by the community, and laid off most of its employees. All of its assets were acquired in 2002 by Hotsprings, Inc., a new company formed by some ex-employees and Axis Communications shareholders.
Most of the work on the Hotline enhancements have been done by r0r (HOPE, KDX), kang (IRC) and Devin Teske. The Hotline network is no longer in use. Hotline was designed in 1996 and known as hotwire by Australian programmer Adam Hinkley (known online by his username, Hinks ), then 17 years old, as a Mac OS application.
Initially, Hotline Communications sought a wide audience for its products, and organizations as diverse as Avid Technology, Apple Computer Australia, and public high schools used Hotline. Hotsprings Inc.
See KDX, and Darknet for details. There is an official based distribution: GLoarbLine Hotline s largest community Mixed Blood, started by Prime Chuck and SAINT in 1998, is still active to this day on Wired. However, no stable build of Hotline 2.0 was ever released. The Hotline applications were distributed as shareware and combined chat, message board and file transfer capabilities and operated using a client/server (not peer-to-peer) model.
Some versions also support an IRC bridge or KDX bridge. In 1997, Hotline won the Macworld Best of the Show award at the Boston MacWorld Expo.
Hotline Communications main activity was the publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software product named Hotline Connect, informally called, simply, Hotline. At its peak, Hotline received millions of dollars in VC funding, grew to employ more than fifty people, served millions of users, and won accolades at trade shows and in newspapers and computer magazines around the world. Hotline eventually attracted more of an underground community, which saw it as an easier to use successor to the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) community.
Hotline Communications Limited (HCL) was a software company founded in 1997, based in Toronto, Canada, with employees also in the United States and Australia. It received accolades in computer magazines and the mainstream press from Macworld Sweden (which awarded it a Golden Mouse Award ) to the Los Angeles Times, which called it one of the best kept secrets on the internet .
Hotline predates the Napster and Gnutella file sharing products. has since also abandoned development of the Hotline Connect software suite; the last iteration of Hotline Connect was released in December 2003.
Lawsuits against Hinkley were filed by both Hotline Communications and Redrock, and Hinkley lost copyright of his AppWarrior library as well as rights over the Hotline software. In mid-October of the same year, the company announced the re-hire of their engineering team in anticipation of the release of Hotline 2.0 on their website (http://www.bigredh.com/ - offline as of May 2006).
The Hotline protocol was a binary protocol which accounted for its high speed efficient transfers in the days when most internet users still used modems and dialup. Eventually, Canadian Jason Roks approached Adam Hinkley and encouraged him to move to Toronto, where Hotline Communications, Ltd.
Six other fans of Hotline joined Adam Hinkley s efforts to promote and market the Hotline programs, working day and night and using the company s own products to stay in touch from across the USA, Canada, and Australia. At the time, the company s main objective was to release a stable Windows-compatible version to reach a wider audience. 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.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hotline Communications lost the bulk of its VC funding, and went out of business later that month. The protocol was reverse engineered by the internet community, leading to a wide variety of third party clients being written in RealBasic. Hotline Connect consisted of three applications, distributed separately (via Internet download or on promotional CDs): A company named Haxial Software released a Hotline-like product named KDX. Jörn and Mirko Hartmann released similar software deliberately kept Mac-only called Carracho in 1998 There have been several open-source versions of the Hotline Client and Server suite, which were not based on the official source code, and provide several protocol enhancements (also known as HOPE - HOtline Protocol Extension).
Wired is similar to Hotline and developed by Zanka software. Company and product history Legal battle . The source code for the Hotline applications was based on a class library, AppWarrior (AW), which Hinkley wrote.
The legal battle and Hinkley s case drew some media attention, especially on the Internet. At the end of the 1990s, by then outdated Hotline software started to gradually fade, as other systems became increasingly popular. Many early Hotline users felt sympathy for Hinkley and viewed Hotline Communications with a bad eye and the Hotline Connect suite did not sell well.
