Hotline Communications

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Hotline Communications Limited (HCL) was a software company founded in 1997, based in Toronto, Canada, with employees also in the United States and Australia. Hotline Communications' main activity was the publishing and distribution of the multi-application, peer-to-peer communication software suite Hotline Connect, informally called, simply, Hotline. Initially, Hotline Communications sought a wide audience for its products, and organizations as diverse as Avid Technology and public high schools used Hotline. For better or for worse, Hotline eventually attracted many who used it primarily for downloading pirated software and pornography. (Some employees left as the Hotline user community became more of an "underground" gathering place.) Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hotline Communications lost the bulk of its VC funding, and went out of business later that month. All 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.

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[edit] History

Hotline was designed in 1996 and known as "hotwire" by Australian programmer Adam Hinkley, then 17 years old, as a Mac OS application. The source 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 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. Eventually, Canadian Jason Roks approached Adam Hinkley and encouraged him to move to Toronto, where Hotline Communications, Ltd. was incorporated. In 1997, Hotline won the "Macworld Best of the Show" award at 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-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 better peer-to-peer 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.

[edit] Hotline Connect software suite

Many Hotline Server users did not have a fixed IP address at the time Hotline was developed; Hotline clients users can browse server lists by accessing "trackers", machines with fixed IPs that keep track of the IPs of online servers.
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Many Hotline Server users did not have a fixed IP address at the time Hotline was developed; Hotline clients users can browse server lists by accessing "trackers", machines with fixed IPs that keep track of the IPs of online servers.

The Hotline applications were distributed as shareware and combined chat, message board and file sharing capabilities and operate using a peer-to-peer model. As such, Hotline is sometimes credited with being a pioneering file sharing application, as it predates software like Napster and Gnutella. The key difference between Hotline and modern peer-to-peer applications is that the client and server applications are separate and that end users can choose who may connect to their server as well as set different privileges for different users.

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

  • Hotline Client: an application used to access Hotline servers 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's IP address.
  • Hotline Server: an easily set up server application.
  • Hotline Tracker: a name server, used to keep track of the IP addresses of several Hotline servers.

[edit] Hotline successors

Adam Hinkley later released a HL-like software suite called KDX. He also writes blogs under his alias spl: http://spl.haxial.net/

Jörn and Mirko Hartmann released similar software deliberately kept mac-only called Carracho in 1998 [1], still used today by a small, tight-knit group of users.

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

[edit] References

Company and product history

Legal battle

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