Hotline Communications Limited (HCL) was a software company founded in 1997, based in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Canada, with employees also in the United States and Australia. Hotline Communications' main activity was the publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software

Communication software

Communication software is used to provide remote access to systems and exchange files and messages in text, audio and/or video formats between different computers or user IDs...

 product named Hotline Connect, informally called, simply, Hotline. Initially, Hotline Communications sought a wide audience for its products, and organizations as diverse as Avid Technology

Avid Technology

Avid Technology, Inc. is an American company specializing in video and audio production technology; specifically, digital non-linear editing systems, management and distribution services. It was created in 1987 and became a publicly traded company in 1993...

, Apple Computer Australia, and public high schools used Hotline. At its peak, Hotline received millions of dollars in venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 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

Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

 (IRC) community. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks

September 11, 2001 attacks

The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...

, Hotline Communications lost the bulk of its VC funding, and went out of business later that month. All of its assets were acquired in 2002 by Hotsprings, Inc., a new company formed by some ex-employees and shareholders. Hotsprings Inc. has since also abandoned development of the Hotline Connect software suite; the last iteration of Hotline Connect was released in December 2003. Currently, only a few servers remain using the Hotline protocol, essentially private.

History

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

Mac OS

Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

 application. The source code

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

 for the Hotline applications was based on a class library, "AppWarrior" (AW), which Hinkley wrote. AppWarrior would later become litigious, as Hinkley wrote parts of it while he was employed by an Australian company, Redrock Holdings. 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. Eventually, Canadian Jason Roks approached Adam Hinkley and encouraged him to move to Toronto, where Hotline Communications, Ltd. was incorporated. In 1997, Hotline won a "Best of the Show" award from one of the award ceremonies concurrent with the Boston MacWorld Expo. 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". At the time, the company's main objective was to release a stable Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

-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. 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. 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. In September 2001, Hotline Communications announced development of version 2.0 of the Hotline suite had been stopped, beta versions of which had not been well received by the community, and laid off most of its employees. 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). However, no stable build of Hotline 2.0 was ever released.

As of February 2011, hltracker.com is back up as a tracker: clients can connect and it is starting to siphon users into servers again. Various versions of hotline can be found on-line, and are freely downloadable at BNET.cc. A wiki has also been created to begin re-documenting the protocol in order to make it easier and more widely available. This domain name expired on 10/03/2011 and is pending renewal or deletion.

Hotline Connect software suite

The Hotline applications were distributed as shareware

Shareware

The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

 and combined chat

Online chat

Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

, message board and file transfer capabilities and operated using a client/server (not peer-to-peer) model. Hotline predates the Napster

Napster

Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...

 and Gnutella

Gnutella

Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network which, at the time of its creation, was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model...

 file sharing products. The Hotline protocol was a binary protocol

Binary protocol

A binary protocol is a protocol which is intended or expected to be read by a machine rather than a human being, as opposed to a plain text protocol such as IRC, SMTP, or HTTP...

 which accounted for its high speed efficient transfers in the days when most internet users still used modem

Modem

A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...

s and dialup. The protocol was reverse engineered by the internet community, leading to a wide variety of third party clients being written in RealBasic

REALbasic

Realbasic is the object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language used in Real Studio, a programming environment, developed and commercially marketed by Real Software, Inc of Austin, Texas for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, 32-bit x86 Linux and the web.- Language features :RB is a strongly...

.

Hotline Connect consisted of three applications, distributed separately (via Internet download or on promotional CDs):

• Hotline Client: an application used to access Hotline servers
  Server (computing)
  In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
  
   set up by users running the Hotline Server software. Hotline Connect users with a client installed could connect to servers they knew using the host
  Server (computing)
  In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
  
  's IP address.
• Hotline Server: an easy-to-configure server application.
• Hotline Tracker: a name server, used to keep track of the IP addresses of several Hotline servers.

Hotline successors

A company named Haxial Software (really Adam Hinkley) released a Hotline-like product named KDX.

Jörn and Mirko Hartmann released similar software deliberately kept Mac-only called Carracho in 1998 Carracho GbR - Welcome, still used today by a small, tight-knit group of users. There have also been several third party applications that implement the Hotline protocol including applications such as Pitbull Pro.

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).
Some versions also support an IRC

Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

 bridge or KDX bridge. Most of the work on the Hotline enhancements have been done by r0r (HOPE, KDX), kang (IRC) and Devin Teske. See Darknet for details.

There is an official based distribution:
GLoarbLine GLoarbLine

Hotline's largest community Mixed Blood, started by Prime Chuck and SAINT in 1998, is still active to this day on Wired. Wired is similar to Hotline and developed by Zanka software.

Open source clients

• Fidelio - open-source Hotline client, no longer updated since 2002 (Linux/Unix)