My Ars user account is old enough to drink alcohol...Ha! I know right. I've been on Ars for fully half my life.
Anyone remember Hotline?
- Thread starter melk
- Start date
I may or may not know exactly who ran one of the largest non-EDU based HL servers named "oldman" which was originally ran off a 1990 SE/30 with 20MB of ram and 7x random SCSI drives connected to a T1 so even though it was older than dirt, it was one of the fastest HL servers around. It was also a trip because the SE/30 could only realize 2TB volumes so the entire desktop was filled with drive icons - lol. In the end it was on some 603 based Powermac with a hacked Adaptec UW160 card running 15x 36GB drives. Such a fun time =p
Yet so on topic.
I remember a HS friend on mine once we’d gone off to college describing owning “the world’s largest Gopher server”.
I remember a HS friend on mine once we’d gone off to college describing owning “the world’s largest Gopher server”.
man, that name really rings a bell, but I can't remember anything about it.
When I was in first year at uni, my halls/dorms had T1 lines and I'd get a little over a megabyte per second to decent HL servers, which was insane compared to the 14.4kb/s dial-up I had at home. I ran an HL server on it for about 2 weeks until people had uploaded so many files my 4gb hard disk filled up. Good times!
What's the statutory limitation period in the USA? Are we safe discussing our crimes? 
I don’t know what you’re talking about, those thousands of ROMs were just backups of games I legitimately owned and dumped myself.What's the statutory limitation period in the USA? Are we safe discussing our crimes?
Wow - totally forgot about Hotline. It was awesome. Way ahead of its time. It was the "software gettin' place" for poor college me.
I used a few Australian FirstClass based BBSes back in the day, and it was pretty impressive. My first experiences of UseNet were because of a BBS called khazad-dum that had some interface with usenet and the wider internet (through arpranet?) and would sync nightly.
Hotline had that same social aspect. I was part of the VistaCartel when they made the Jinn TC and then did Myth 3, and I would just “hang” on their HL server for the whole day.
Curiously, over lockdown in 2020, I got into discord heavily with a few of my social groups, and it reminds me so much of those BBS / Hotline experiences. Just without the GUIs (sad) but with the sense of small communities.
Aye, the social aspect of Hotline was always the entire focus for me, the w4r3z available on some servers was way down the list of things I cared about.
Same here, but with group chats in either Signal or iMessage.
In Russia, Hotline users had an annual meet-up for a while. Very few poor students. Mostly pre-press types with beards and beer bellies.
Good old times. My first server was Hotline and ran on a Performa 6200 with 4GB Drive and 56k modem. Later I switched to Carracho, than to Wired1 and than to Wired2.
In Hotline Times I got my Hands on an app "Operation Blackout" for Mac. It had a black H as icon. With this tool you can connect to HL 1.8 (and only 1.8!) Server and abuse a backdoor of it. Means ... with Operation Blackout you can connect to a server as admin without login and password. I connected to some Windows pr0n Servers and did some "funny" stuff there. Yes it was a very "evil" Tool. :devious:
In Hotline Times I got my Hands on an app "Operation Blackout" for Mac. It had a black H as icon. With this tool you can connect to HL 1.8 (and only 1.8!) Server and abuse a backdoor of it. Means ... with Operation Blackout you can connect to a server as admin without login and password. I connected to some Windows pr0n Servers and did some "funny" stuff there.
Yes it was a very "evil" Tool. :devious:Stumbled across this like a lot of you all probably did...
Hotline, now there's a name I have not heard in a while. My main server I hung on was setup by a gentleman who went by the moniker of "Grinch (Al)"
Shout out to some of the other users:
mamacat
darkwing
juju
mario
robb
squid <- that's me
yeesh
layne
I actually met up with ol' Yeesh once... greetings to all out there who remember Hotline as an awesome place and time.
Hotline, now there's a name I have not heard in a while. My main server I hung on was setup by a gentleman who went by the moniker of "Grinch (Al)"
Shout out to some of the other users:
mamacat
darkwing
juju
mario
robb
squid <- that's me
yeesh
layne
I actually met up with ol' Yeesh once... greetings to all out there who remember Hotline as an awesome place and time.
I started up a Mastodon server on the original badmoon.fortyoz.org domain a few days ago.
If I can keep it stable for a few months and work out all of the hosting stuff, maybe I’ll start opening it up to accounts if there’s any interest.
Former badmoon admin here. Those were some fun times.
If I can keep it stable for a few months and work out all of the hosting stuff, maybe I’ll start opening it up to accounts if there’s any interest.
Former badmoon admin here. Those were some fun times.
And fast speeds. Imagine time traveling back to yourself and talking about gigabit fiber optic internet... TO YOU HOUSE
I remember being in awe of the folks with T1 connections (1.5Mbps symmetric), haha.
Wow remember Hotline back in the days. I do miss the 90s internet era. I remember working with CuSeeme and doing video calls with it and it was so cool working with folks back the.
During high school, I had a 33.6Kbps modem at home and some sort of ~512Kbps DSL connection at school. I got to college, moved into a dorm room, and was promptly informed that my dorm building would be the guinea pig for allowing students to connect to the campus Ethernet network. I promptly signed up, and was told about a week later to plug my Power Mac 7100 into the 10baseT jack in the wall and apply certain TCP/IP settings. Boom, full 10Mbps speed in both directions. It was the first time I had ever had fast access to data and it was vastly more mind-blowing than the first time I got to connect to a gigabit network a decade and a half later.
Was reminiscing about Hotline tonight and for curiosity's sake did some searching and was very surprised to find that a modern client written in SwiftUI exists!
Not sure if this was already common knowledge but it sure was news to me!
Not sure if this was already common knowledge but it sure was news to me!
Haha holy hell I can't believe it's still surviving. A bit late finding an iOS client there too but neat nonetheless.
(Long time no see
)Haha holy hell I can't believe it's still surviving. A bit late finding an iOS client there too but neat nonetheless.
(Long time no see
gg rip!
I also found this cross-platform Hotline Server, may have to play around with it soon.
Hahaha - I was just going to say the same thing. I used to run a Hotline server in college from my Powermac 7500. It hosted <ahem> a variety of content.
what was your hotline username back then?Hahaha - I was just going to say the same thing. I used to run a Hotline server in college from my Powermac 7500. It hosted <ahem> a variety of content.