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. The protocol was reverse engineered by the internet community, leading to a wide variety of third party clients being written in RealBasic, one of the few easy-to-use development environments available on the Macintosh at the time.
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.
Read more about this topic: Hotline Communications
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