Hotline Communications

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 a multi-purpose client/server communication software 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, Apple Computer Australia, and public high schools used 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. (As it became used more and more for downloading pirated software and pornography, some employees and users left.)Fact|date=July 2007 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 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. The Hotline network is no longer in mainstream use, but some of the online communities survive to this day.

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 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 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 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 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.

Hotline Connect software suite

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. Hotline predates the Napster and Gnutella file sharing products. 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.

"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 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 released a Hotline-like product named KDX.

Jörn and Mirko Hartmann released similar software deliberately kept Mac-only called Carracho in 1998 [http://www.carracho.com/] , still used today by a small, tight-knit group of users. Pitbull Pro is also worth mentioning at [http://www.hotline-tools.com/]

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. See KDX, and Darknet for details.

There is an official based distribution:GLoarbLine [http://www.lorbac.net]

References

Company and product history
*" [http://company.monster.com/hotc/ Hotline Communications profile on Monster.com]
*" [http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/02/24feature.html Hotline to the Underground] ", "Salon.com Archive". Accessed on April 3, 2005.
*" [http://media.gm.com/news/releases/p010807a.html General Motors Press Release] ", 'GM & Hotline Partner Together'
*" [http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bigredh.com Wayback Machine search results for 'bigredh.com'] ", "Internet Archive ( [http://archive.org website] ) Wayback Machine". Accessed on April 7, 2005. — A chronicle of the different versions of the bigredh.com website. " [http://www.bigredh.com/ BigRedH.com] " was Hotline Communication's website and e-commerce platform from June 2001 on. E-commerce "service provider" Digital River designed the original website ( [http://drhome.digitalriver.com/livehtml/newsite/pr_201.html Digital River press release] ).
*" [http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hotspringsinc.com Wayback Machine search results for 'hotspringsinc.com'] ", "Internet Archive Wayback Machine". Accessed on April 7, 2005. — A chronicle of the different versions of the hotspringsinc.com website.
* [http://www.vivahx.com/ VivaHX - Everything Hotline]
* [http://hotline.tracker-tracker.com/public/ Tracker-Tracker for Hotline]
*

Legal battle
*" [http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/02/25feature.html Hotline's Civil War] ", "Salon.com Archive". Accessed on April 3, 2005.
*" [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/lawrpt/stories/s295800.htm Employment Law, Intellectual Property Law and the New Economy] " (radio program transcript), "The Law Report" ( [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/lawrpt/default.htm website] ), Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National ( [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/default.htm website] ). Accessed April 7, 2005. — Discussion of the "Hotline vs. Hinkley" legal battle in the broader context of intellectual property law in Australia.
*" [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/09/1639212&mode=thread Adam Hinkley's IP Hindsights] ", "Slashdot.org". Accessed on April 7, 2005. — Slashdot discussion about original "Hotline" programmer Adam Hinkley's legal battle against his former Hotline Communications, Ltd. associates.
*" [http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/vic/VSC/2001/91.html Redrock Holdings Pty Ltd & Hotline Communications Ltd & Ors v Hinkley (2001) VSC 91 (4 April 2001)] ", Text of the 2001 Victoria Supreme Court judgement assigning ownership of Hotline Connect to Hotline Communications.