# Hotline Video

By Al of DECSystem10

So while surfing the web on Classilla, I downloaded a few videos
from cornica.org and one I watched was one on Hotline[0], which is
an Internet BBS that was mostly for the Classic Mac OS, though
there are clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and maybe even Unix now?

I'll be honest, I've only ever used Hotline to download files, but
we've been considering doing an art project that could stand to
have some kind of community. Hotline as a distribution method seems
like a great idea.

It would be far from the only distribution method for what we plan
to do, and we are interested in looking into other niche retro
things (hi Gopher) for that. A detail we had decided on is that it
would be a period piece, since we decided that an old Mac made a
great, relatively distraction-free environment.

The video was made in 2015, and while by that time there was active
interest in reviving Hotline, in 2025 the fruits of the labor that
began in 2008 have yielded significant results, especially with
the teamup (or ever growing overlap!) between the vintage Macintosh
community and the Hotline community. Hotline is a de facto open
protocol by our standards, as there are many open source clients
and servers for it nowadays. We have no real issues using it, and
we're a system of people who prefer FOSS.

...except maybe me. I prefer abandonware myself.

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[0]: http://www.cornica.org/mac-apps/hotline/