 The logo for Hotline Communications, once dubbed "the best kept secret" on the internet by the L.A. Times | |
| Founded | 1997  |
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Hotline Communications Limited (HCL) was asoftware company founded in 1997, based inToronto, Canada, with employees also in the United States and Australia. Hotline Communications' main activity was the publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/servercommunication software product namedHotline Connect, informally called, simply,Hotline. Initially, Hotline Communications sought a wide audience for its products, and organizations as diverse asAvid Technology,Apple Computer Australia, and public high schools used Hotline. At its peak, Hotline received millions of dollars inventure capital 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.[citation needed]
Hotline eventually attracted more of an "underground" community,[1] which saw it as an easier to use successor to theInternet Relay Chat (IRC) community. In 2001 Hotline Communications lost the bulk of its VC funding, and went out of business later that year. All of its assets were acquired in 2002 byHotsprings, Inc., a new company formed by some ex-employees andshareholders. Hotsprings Inc. has since also abandoned development of the Hotline Connect software suite; the last iteration ofHotline Connect was released in December 2003.
Since 2008 some Hotliners have been slowly purchasing the defunct URLs so that they now have the main server, tracker, andBigRedH.com. This has allowed a revival of sorts while many open source clients have popped up over the last few years. Many active projects now have led to a revival of sorts seeing over 30 servers on the main tracker (HLTracker.com).
All new clients and old have been preserved on the new wiki site (moved from advertisement based wiki hosting tohlwiki.com. The community has since flourished and new servers pop up every day with new clients allowing modern computer support while still having older clients for 20+ year old computer support.
Hotline was designed in 1996 and known as "hotwire" by Australian programmerAdam Hinkley (known online by his username, "Hinks"), then 17 years old, as aclassic Mac OS application. Thesource code 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, David Murphy, Alex King, Phil Hilton, Jason Roks, David Bordin, and Terrance Gregory, 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 US, 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 BostonMacWorld Expo. It received accolades in computer magazines and the mainstream press fromMacworld Sweden (which awarded it a "Golden Mouse Award"[2]) to theLos Angeles Times, which called it one of the "best kept secrets on the internet",[3] as well as a short article inWired Magazine's September 1997 issue.[4] At the time, the company's main objective was to release a stableWindows-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 forHotline 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.
In the late 1990s, when Hotline's popularity was at its peak, thousands of Hotline servers were available, catering to a wide variety of user interests, including pornography, MP3s, and pirated software; it was these underground purposes that drew the majority of media attention.[5] To access these files most Hotline servers required a login and password. The password was often obtainable by visiting a website provided by the server admin and clicking on a banner advertisement. Server admins would earn money per click and in return offer pirated software, music, movies and pornography to users.
At the end of the 1990s, by then outdated Hotline software started to gradually fade, aspeer-to-peer systems likeGnutella andKazaa 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[6] (offline as of May 2006). However, no stable build of Hotline 2.0 was ever released.
As of June 2024, hltracker.com and tracked.stickytack.com continue to provide tracker services for Hotline clients.[7]
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Company and product history
Legal battle
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