[HN Gopher] Hotline for modern Apple systems
___________________________________________________________________
Hotline for modern Apple systems
Author : tonymet
Score : 457 points
Date : 2025-02-06 07:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| codetrotter wrote:
| Does it support TLS?
|
| Or is everything unencrypted on the wire?
| melomac wrote:
| Qba'g lbh jbeel, ebg13 jvyy cebgrpg lbh!
| mckn1ght wrote:
| ~?=J 2 ?__3 H@F=5?VE FD6 C@Ecf[ J@F =67E E96 4=F6 C:89E E96C6
| :? E96 4JA96CE6IEP
| Terretta wrote:
| tr '\!-~' 'P-~\!-O'
| amatecha wrote:
| The unofficial *nix ports allowed some basic encryption but
| this was never supported by the original Mac (and later Win)
| clients. Since the protocol was plaintext, it was easily
| reverse engineered, thus "hx" was born :)
| V99 wrote:
| TLS did "exist" (well, as SSL), but this was a time when you'd
| maybe see it used on a few websites that had it on just the
| specific pages that took a credit card.
|
| It was well before most other protocols were worrying about the
| security or privacy of being intercepted at all. Decades before
| TLS by-default-because-why-not started becoming a thing
| (largely because of LetsEncrypt). Especially for an app that
| was mostly for pirating stuff. Your email and it's
| login/passwords, IRC, instant messaging, regular browsing, etc
| all happened in plain text.
|
| And despite the physical networks being super vulnerable back
| then. Ethernet was mostly connected by hubs/ring/shared coax,
| so every device received every other's packets. WiFi was just
| coming around and is a shared medium. Several rounds of inept
| security schemes failed to even keep people who don't know the
| network password from intercepting nearby traffic. Most
| networks didn't have security on yet anyway.
|
| The Hotline protocol was/is mostly binary messages sent over
| TCP with a 4 character text message type followed by a
| corresponding packed data structure of the related data. (https
| ://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Protocol#Session_Initializat...)
| incanus77 wrote:
| > TLS did "exist" (well, as SSL), but this was a time when
| you'd maybe see it used on a few websites that had it on just
| the specific pages that took a credit card.
|
| Indeed, I had forgotten about this. You'd go from the regular
| site on HTTP to the credit card page on HTTPS and back again.
| For a time, it was important to check that the page that you
| were actually entering the card details on was on HTTPS
| before you clicked the submit, and that the target was also
| HTTPS.
| superkuh wrote:
| Are you worried someone is going to MITM you? Hotline works
| just fine without encryption. That said, some people felt as
| you do even back in the early 2000s and the KDX server/client
| software set is basically Hotline with TLS. It was only
| introduced at the tail end of the scene though and not widely
| adopted. There are some servers that support both kdx and
| hotline clients.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Hotline was the greatest single platform for the Macintosh in the
| 1990s. First Class was great, but Hotline was SO simple, you just
| pop in a tracker address, fire up the server, point it at 1
| folder on your HDD and yer out there, as a pirate BBS server host
| on the internet hosting those brand new things, MP3's and those
| wildly hard to gather NES roms, or that illicit copy of Adobe
| Photoshop 4.5.
|
| Hotline took the AOL script kiddies from #Zelifcam and put them
| on the real big boy Internet without any restrictions or
| repercussions. It was glorious time. I still have a Big Red H
| necklace given to me by the I-forgot-his-name author of the
| platform.
| karlshea wrote:
| I brought my whole Mac 6 hours away to my aunt's for
| Thanksgiving one year so I could download a bunch of bigger
| umm... items off of Hotline since they had brand-new stunningly
| fast several-megabit cable internet when I just had barely
| better than dialup ADSL at home. It was amazing.
| SG- wrote:
| Adam Hinkley was his name.
| amatecha wrote:
| Hell yeah, it was the best. I still remember finding
| "Tempo/MacQuake Palace", which was the most glorious
| combinations of things I thought I could find - Mac OS Tempo[0]
| and the unauthorized Quake source port for Mac! Amazing stuff
| at the time.
|
| (on that note, wow, I have not heard "zelifcam" in a very long
| time! haha)
|
| [0] https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Mac_OS_Tempo_(pre-release)
| rhaksw wrote:
| > "Tempo/MacQuake Palace"
|
| Confession: I ran that. Sorry, Apple- that was wrong!
|
| If I recall correctly, I'd grab the latest version from a
| private Hotline site, then re-host it on my public server
| backed by a cable modem, whose name you got right. I loved
| Quake too.
|
| I'm not sure that all was healthy at the time, and I like to
| imagine I'm over such distractions, but here I am..
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I've never heard of Hotline, even though I was heavily involved
| in the Apple community in the 1990s, but according to the
| Wikipedia page
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications), it looks
| like a good-but-shortlived product that was killed from within:
|
| "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."
| kennywinker wrote:
| It was huge for a certain demographic... very-online teens who
| are interested in downloading punk and hiphop mp3s and maybe a
| keygen or serial number database or two. The community lasted
| much longer than the company, afaik - but was ultimately killed
| by easier ways of getting media - napster and then limewire and
| the like.
| inetknght wrote:
| Hotline predated Napster. Hotline Client, Hotline Server, and
| Hotline Tracker. It was pretty damn cool. It had way more
| features than Napster ever did. It was amazing for black
| flagging with the first high speed^H^Has modem I ever bought, a
| good ole' 56k.
| esafak wrote:
| Did it have any interesting features that are not available in
| today's products?
| kennywinker wrote:
| I'd say it's main feature was linking file sharing to
| community. Napster and the clones that followed it were
| efficient ways to move files around, but you didn't get to (or
| have to) chat with people about their music collections while
| you did it - if i recall right, often servers were run as take
| a file leave a file, so if you had something good to exchange
| that was social capital
| esafak wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Such rules (ul/dl ratios) have existed
| since the BBS era.
| Mainsail wrote:
| I may be making this up, but I seem to recall a chat feature
| on one of Napster, Limewire, or Kazaa.
| ghotli wrote:
| Soulseek is likely the one you're remembering. I remember
| talking to people with similar collections of music.
| Hotline was my primary passion for quite some time but
| soulseek had a longer run of utility in my childhood on the
| nascent web.
| bradly wrote:
| > if i recall right, often servers were run as take a file
| leave a file, so if you had something good to exchange that
| was social capital
|
| Often there was a requests directory in the top level with
| you would need to upload a requested album/program in order
| to get access to the entire server. There was also banner
| clicking to get a password, but that never worked tbh.
| informal007 wrote:
| It's like local Google Drive.
| yoshamano wrote:
| Kind of. It was kind of like a community in a box. The server
| and client software were dead simple to use and could be run
| off of a potato. You would get a message board, live chat, and
| file sharing all in one package. Servers could be advertised on
| a Tracker that could be queried from within the client. I was a
| Windows and BeOS user at the time and spent a fair amount of
| time bumming around anime and music themed servers. Also ran
| into one or two servers with big "Coast To Coast AM" vibes. Fun
| times.
| iwontberude wrote:
| It was a BBS with a GUI
| amatecha wrote:
| It was very much a "TCP/IP BBS". One unique feature was the
| "tracker", on which you could list your server. You could
| browse the servers, hop onto one (as long as guest access was
| on, or they'd have a login/pass in the server description), and
| there would be a user list, a chat window, a Files window, and
| a News window. Usually there would be people actively in
| discussion in the Chat. Indeed, many places require that you
| upload one of the "requests" to get an account with download
| privs. Others allowed guest download, but that became more rare
| over time. Each server had its own vibe/community.
|
| There was an easter egg where you could press Ctrl-F12 and type
| in a "command" into the text entry box. These would unlock some
| special hidden functionality like changing your icon to one
| only available via that command (presumably for the devs of the
| software so they could have an exclusive user icon), or
| encipher your chat messages with a basic offset-substitution
| cipher. There were others that would restrict your chat to only
| saying "oink!" and turning your icon into a pig -- this was
| used as a prank to use on people "Hey dude if you press
| Ctrl-F12 and type fuelharp you'll get secret admin access!"
| (only to have them turn into a pig) :) Another Ctrl-F12 command
| would report your upload/download ratio into the chat - either
| a fun way to brag about your good ratio, or a good one to bait
| perennial leeches into typing so they'd inadvertantly reveal
| their pesky leeching ways!
|
| Anyway, all in all a really fun place for a few years where it
| was "the" online destination for Mac users. I spent an ungodly
| amount of hours on there (and still hop on pretty often). :)
| esafak wrote:
| I wonder if that's how oink's pink palace got its name.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace
| tonymet wrote:
| Vibes. Mac culture in the 90s was reactionary and distinct from
| PC culture. Remember the "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC " commercials?
| Those were downstream of the Mac user culture.
| chriscjcj wrote:
| Now how about Carracho?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I just remember I visited VersionTracker everyday looking for
| software. What a different world.
| lampiaio wrote:
| Oh my, I used to do that too! There was always something
| interesting being released, even if just some point release
| for the odd application.
| morphle wrote:
| Those are my thoughts too.
| amatecha wrote:
| or KDX! :)
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I remember that. I don't remember how the two were related
| but the UI was very customized and futuristic. I loved that
| too.
| amatecha wrote:
| KDX was the followup to Hotline, made by the same guy IIRC,
| he made a new company "Haxial". and yeah it was quite nice!
| lampiaio wrote:
| KDX's UI really was something else.
|
| I remember first learning about torrents from a KDX server
| that had a folder with instructions on "how to download
| Matrix Reloaded at full speed". Downloaded some suspicious
| "BitTorrent" (I remember thinking the name was appropriate
| for what it promised) client along with a funny ".torrent"
| file"... and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the transfer
| speed use the entirety of my 256kbps connection.
| aorth wrote:
| Came here to ask the same thing. I started on Hotline and ended
| up on Carracho in the late 1990s. That orange icon!!! I used to
| tie up our house's phone line trying to chat with people and
| download things.
| mig39 wrote:
| Excellent! I remember running one of these servers on my 2Mb/s
| ADSL connection in small-town BC :-) It was one of my first
| "online communities" that connected a bunch of us around the
| world.
| amatecha wrote:
| Wow nice, are you familiar with one of the still-running
| servers also based out of BC, "Higher Intellect"? Does it ring
| a bell at all? It's one of the longest-running servers, started
| in 2001 or so, still up and active today with the same files
| since then.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I used to hang out there all the time. There was also the
| Calwell RPG server. A few dudes working on an online game.
| There was a beta but it never got off the ground.
| amatecha wrote:
| Hotline was life-changing software for me. It was pretty niche,
| being Mac-only, and its BBS-like nature meant each server had its
| own culture and "cliques" and community. Getting an account on
| certain servers (rather than being a lowly guest) was a
| noteworthy moment. I remember a couple really badass servers like
| one called "JADE: where some guys in a university hosted a
| Hotline server on the uni's insanely fast connection. I want to
| say it was an OC-12 connection (600mbit)? This was in like, 1998.
|
| I still have a few friends from those days, one of whom I talk to
| almost every day. Unfortunately one friend I met on Hotline
| passed away unexpectedly this past July. I never would have
| expected to be making decades-long connections when I was just a
| kid looking for "filez" to download. <3
|
| Actually that same friend gifted me his old PC which was my first
| Windows machine. An amazing and kind gesture which changed the
| course of my life (I had grown up only with Macintosh systems
| until then).
|
| Further, I found music on Hotline that I would never have found
| otherwise. I didn't find much on IRC (didn't know where to look)
| but I made connections with people on Hotline which resulted in
| me being exposed to amazing music from all over the world --
| another life-changing experience. Too awesome :)
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> being Mac-only_
|
| I was an avid Hotline user at the time and connected via
| Windows. Was there third party clients? Vague memories...
|
| Today I'm on Linux and just found out there's a FOSS Qt client
| updated just hours ago... https://github.com/tjohnman/Obsession
| amatecha wrote:
| Hotline got official Windows clients after a year or so! I
| remember feeling a bit salty that our insular club suddenly
| had _intruders_ hahaha :) but yeah and around that time
| people started reverse-engineering the protocol (since it was
| plaintext) and a linux/BSD client "hx" was written. There are
| many unofficial clients:
| https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php
|
| Wow I didn't know Obsession was still being updated, that's
| awesome! thanks for letting me know lol
| Washuu wrote:
| > I was an avid Hotline user at the time and connected via
| Windows. Was there third party clients? Vague memories...
|
| I have a copy of all the official Hotline Windows releases in
| my archive somewhere. I don't know why, but finding the
| server software for Windows back when it released was so
| incredibly difficult. It felt like it was being gatekept.
| efnx wrote:
| Not that I remember. But there was a Mac clone called
| Carracho, and a little later there was a cross platform clone
| called KDX made by Haxial. Those were the days.
| davidmurphy wrote:
| so cool to hear how Hotline impacted you -- really cool.
| zmb_ wrote:
| It was a life-defining piece of software for me too. As a
| teenager I found a server called "REALbasic Cafe" that inspired
| and helped me go from knowing next to nothing about programming
| to making my first money from shareware as a high school kid.
|
| To this day I'm grateful I stumbled across the Hotline software
| and the server.
| samps wrote:
| I had an identical experience with the REALbasic Cafe as a
| kid, down to eventually selling a couple of shareware
| projects. I wonder if we were there at the same time.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I hung out there as well but I found REALbasic hard to
| understand at a young age. It just didn't align with my
| mental model. Later, I discovered Ruby and had great success.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Same here, Hotline was just at the perfect time to have an
| (embarrassingly?) massive impact on my path. Less so the piracy
| aspect of it (though that sure opened my eyes to some
| possibilities with technology). I don't know if I would have
| got into Linux at all (at least not at such a young age) if I
| hadn't fallen into Badmoon (a popular? server at the time) and
| seen people in the user list with hx icons. Badmoon had a bit
| of a bad rap for silly things some of the members did, but as a
| 10-13 year old living in the sticks, meeting such an eclectic
| group (hackers, skaters, techies, artists) was revolutionary.
| amatecha wrote:
| After many years the domain of the default tracker built into the
| client, hltracker.com, expired... Someone in the community
| snapped that up and is hosting a new tracker at the same address,
| so when you fire up the original Hotline clients on an old
| computer or VM, it still works just as if it's 1997 again. Pretty
| sweet! There are quite a few active servers still.
| CountHackulus wrote:
| Hotline was an amazing experience when I was younger. Really
| taught me a lot about devops and about ISPs.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| Same! Managing servers with multiple external hard drives/scsi
| IDs !
| nico wrote:
| Whoa, I think I remember using something like this on BeOS a
| looong time ago
|
| Quick googling, it might have been SilverWing:
| https://preterhuman.net/software/silverwing-beos/
|
| Super cool, downloaded and kinda lost now, but excited to explore
| amatecha wrote:
| Coincidentally that site you just linked also hosts one of the
| longest-running Hotline servers still online:
| https://preterhuman.net/server.php /
| https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php :)
|
| (server address is hl.preterhuman.net )
| nico wrote:
| Amazing. Interesting file names on hl.preterhuman.net. Wow,
| Java games for Nokia phones! This is so cool. Thank you
| amatecha wrote:
| Cheers!! Yeah, this server has been collecting stuff for a
| very long time, and people have contributed lots of neat
| stuff. I'm not sure how many other servers have such a
| historical selection of files, probably not many!
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| Could it have been BeShare?
| nico wrote:
| Just checked it out, looks cool, but don't remember using it
|
| Does it work on top of Hotline as well?
|
| Do you know if there is a current version for Mac? Would love
| to try it out
| seydor wrote:
| I remember running hotline in windows.
|
| Maybe the server was macos-only?
| amatecha wrote:
| It started out as Mac-only, but they later made Windows
| versions of the client and server (and tracker)! :)
| electroly wrote:
| The readme mentions servers and trackers. I also remember a
| _tracker tracker_ , for finding trackers. What an exciting time
| as a young nerd with no money and a lot of spare time.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, that's exactly what the site was!
| https://web.archive.org/web/19991011173529/http://tracker-tr...
| :)
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| Now I wonder if the term "tracker" used for BitTorrent
| originated from Hotline...
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Spent so much time on Hotline. Was truly awesome.
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| As a 14 year old in 1998, I was the sole computer user in my
| family and my parents wouldn't let me have internet access. Of
| course, that didn't stop me and I used ad-supported free ISPs
| like K-mart Blue Light (yes, K-Mart had an internet service!) and
| Freeinet to dial in when my parents were asleep and download
| files from Hotline. I used ResEdit to hack the client binary and
| make the ad windows minimizable :)
|
| What a thrill it was to connect to a fast server and download the
| blazing speed at 3KB/s.
|
| Getting access to a new Hotline server could be involved. Some
| came with instructions to visit a set of web pages (each with
| ads), copy a specific letter from each site and put them all
| together to get the server password.
|
| Once you were in the server, you never knew what you would find.
| Hotline is where I downloaded a lot of warez (like adobe
| products) but some servers had really strange and NSFW stuff -
| including the first snuff type images I had encountered.
|
| At some point, my parents would get clues that I something was
| "wrong" with their phone lines. Call waiting didn't work with
| modems so incoming calls wouldn't come through, and word got back
| about the issues. Luckily I was able to buy a product called
| "Catch a Call" which sat between the phone line and your modem,
| and when an incoming call was detected it would ring, and I would
| rip the cord out of the computer to let the house phone ring.
|
| I started going online more often while my parents were awake and
| I would just listen for them to hit the "talk" button on the
| 900MHz wireless handset and rip the phone cord out of my iMac as
| fast as I could so they wouldn't hear the modem noise through the
| phone. Sometimes when I wasn't fast enough, my mom would yell
| "Jer! Something's wrong with the phone!" and I would walk out,
| hit a few buttons to pretend I was fixing it, and hand it back
| (my mom would usually thank me for helping). She passed away a
| few weeks ago... I never told her about this deceit.
|
| Eventually around 2000/2001 they got a cable modem and life with
| broadband was very sweet.
| amatecha wrote:
| Aw man, first off, my condolences :( Second though, I relate
| very well to your story! I definitely had some "dialed up when
| I wasn't supposed to be" times, enough that my dad once simply
| cut the phone line with a pair of scissors when I was caught
| chatting online at 2-3am _yet again_ :) hehehe .. I have more
| stories but I definitely won't record them here hahaha
| curvaturearth wrote:
| This was quite a time! Hotline, Delta Tao's Clan Lord, mp3s. All
| on a 33.6k modem (or similar). Someone sent me a graphics
| library, Think Pascal and a few other things and I got tinkering
| with graphics way back then too. I believe it was this
| https://www.lysator.liu.se/~ingemar/sat.html
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I played Clan Lord quite a bit. A very peculiar game even for
| its time.
| curvaturearth wrote:
| It was! Or is.. it still exists and runs for free now I think
| davidmurphy wrote:
| So cool to load HN and see this.
|
| I was on Hotline's founding team in the 90s that joined with Adam
| Hinkley to promote and grow Hotline -- here's a press release I
| wrote for Hotline's appearance at Macworld Expo SF '98:
| https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Hotline_MacWorld_Expo_1998 (That
| site has lots more Hotline related archival stuff at
| https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Category:Hotline )
|
| Fun memories. We of course on the Hotline team used Hotline
| itself to keep in touch with each other around the world -- at
| that point, Adam in Australia and the rest of us across the US
| and Canada. Fun antics in the group chat. =)
|
| It was a really fun time. At its peak Hotline went on to be used
| by millions, and even by companies like Apple, GM, and Avid. I
| particularly loved the Toronto Star quote that called Hotline "a
| major force in the online world" at the time.
|
| These days I work for the Computer History Museum and have lots
| of Hotline stuff adorning my cubicle :) )
| chongli wrote:
| Thank you! I used Hotline all the time back in the day. I loved
| it! I was a member of quite a few servers. I really miss the
| cozy feel of a private community like that!
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is a lot of fun. I remember Hotline from the dial-up years,
| and how frustrating it was to use over slow connections, but also
| how much better and Mac-like it was than most BBSes.
| sushidev wrote:
| I can relate to this coming from DOS and BBS systems this sounds
| very familiar. Though by 98 BBSs started to decline as people
| have been moving to use the internet instead..
| soci wrote:
| I owned a Hotline server back in the day. Fun times! I ran it for
| three full years from my student shell account at my college's
| HP-UX server. It was a T3 connection so it was faaaast as hell.
| It got completely unnoticed by the sysadmins... until it didn't!
| They got so mad when finding out that I got my account suspended
| for months.
| SG- wrote:
| what was it called back then?
| tribby wrote:
| it was eye opening as a young person to learn how to change the
| path of a folder on a hotline server to ../ with a debugger
| c22 wrote:
| Just go to this URL and click the 2nd banner ad from the top. The
| password is the 16th word on the page.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| Lol! I made quite a bit of money through middle school and high
| school with this foolishness and hl servers. I was even able to
| pay a friend of mine in another part of the town, a cut if he
| allowed me to run some of my hotline servers on his new cable
| modem (since that was the first part of town to get them). Also
| ran a server on a T1 at an office of another friends.
|
| Another blast from the past regarding hotline, figuring out how
| to name your hotline servers so that they appeared at the TOP
| of the various tracker lists. (And those app/server sounds!)
| rbanffy wrote:
| I _hated_ this soooo much... I had completely forgotten.
|
| Now I hate it again.
| dep_b wrote:
| It seems there's a strong nostalgia for systems around the time
| the internet was still nascent, like the Slack client for Windows
| 95.
|
| I'm still baffled we could run ICQ on 16MB of RAM (maybe I had
| 64MB later on?) while multi-tasking with a browser and mail
| client, while each activity would consume around 1GB each on
| modern machines, except perhaps for some mail clients that are
| still running native code.
|
| And yes we got a lot more stuff in return like images and video,
| and I don't miss the noise of my HDD caching at every little
| PhotoShop edit I do, but when I read that Hotline could run on
| 10MB of RAM I'm really questioning what we're doing nowadays.
| 9dev wrote:
| If you have moved between homes a few times, you'll notice how
| you seem to occupy all available space eventually. It's a good
| optimization strategy, I think. There's just no reason to waste
| time tuning software for optimal efficiency if the users
| hardware is powerful enough they'd never even notice. Yes, that
| means software is less efficient than it was, old devices have
| more trouble running new apps, and doing a bunch of things at
| once hogs computers down faster--but for the majority of use
| cases, that is not a concern.
| dep_b wrote:
| I built some native apps for macOS recently and a 10MB
| installer with a below 100MB footprint after running for
| months makes me wonder what would happen if all of my apps
| were truly native.
| pocketarc wrote:
| macOS is the best platform for wondering that, too.
|
| Apple's ecosystem is incredible, all the APIs they provide,
| all the neat little native functionality you can build into
| your apps, all virtually for free, and a user base that
| cares about the quality of their apps and is willing to pay
| for it.
|
| There's no better platform for building a native app, in my
| opinion.
| msephton wrote:
| I built a modern equivalent of an old classic Macintosh app
| --Stapler--and the file size is roughly the same if you
| take unty account the fact my new app contains both Intel
| and Apple silicon architectures.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41216055
| pocketarc wrote:
| I guess that's really the thing - when a 2TB SSD is $100 and
| and 64GB RAM another $130... there's just not much ROI in
| trying to make the app more efficient. Your users won't care.
|
| I personally still value it, and I try to build super-
| efficient apps, but... I'm the minority. And I can understand
| why.
| kstrauser wrote:
| And as a percentage of resources, modern apps aren't
| necessarily awful. If your IDE takes a gig of RAM, that's
| absolutely a lot, but it's relatively 1.6% of that 64GB
| system.
|
| Sure, it can add up, and we shouldn't waste resources just
| because we can, but I'm not going to lose sleep trying to
| optimize it when the rest of my system still has the other
| 98.4% of RAM available for use.
| msephton wrote:
| I see your point, but...
|
| > There's just no reason to waste time tuning software for
| optimal efficiency if the users hardware is powerful enough
| they'd never even notice.
|
| ...but users do notice. They notice that their browser is
| slow, 8GB RAM isn't enough, every app they download is
| multiple hundred megabytes or even multiple gigabytes. Only
| very rarely can apps justify being that large.
|
| I build native apps and pick native apps over alternatives
| and the experience is much, much nicer.
|
| Whether users could articulate what they're experiencing is a
| different question. The bad experience we're talking about
| had been normalised over the past 15 years or so.
| 9dev wrote:
| > Whether users could articulate what they're experiencing
| is a different question. The bad experience we're talking
| about had been normalised over the past 15 years or so.
|
| I could counter that by saying people have had unpleasant
| experiences with software before, too; being way too
| technical and non-intuitive is one of that.
|
| But my point isn't just that users won't notice anyway, but
| _optimising_ for that isn 't a good strategy anymore--at
| least from the perspective of commercial software vendors.
| Performance tuning reaches a point of diminishing returns
| very quickly.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Optimising for older hardware might not be a good
| commercial strategy, but I still get a kick out of making
| my software nimble and fast.
|
| I like to joke giving engineers fast machines is a
| mistake, that having them on 8GB dual-core Celerons would
| help optimise their software.
|
| OTOH, it's also a valuable strategy to give them now the
| machines that'll be mainstream when the product is
| finished. That one I learned from Alan Kay and the Alto.
| tonymet wrote:
| Arguments in favor of poor quality are always so convoluted.
| II2II wrote:
| If we were to run with that analogy, it would be akin to
| saying that someone goes out to buy a new couch only to
| discover that they have to buy a new house in order for it to
| fit inside. That couch may, or may not, seat an addition
| person. Also, I doubt that many people would be able to
| occupy the space of a house that is over 1000 times larger
| (or a million times larger, if you bought your first house in
| the early 1980s).
|
| Don't get me wrong: I recognize that there are legitimate
| reasons for some of the increased size of software. I am also
| willing to accept that some inefficiency is justified in
| order to improve the quality of life for developers. On the
| other hand, we should not be ignoring efficiency for the end
| user solely in favor of efficiency for the developer.
| 9dev wrote:
| I actually just talked to a guy who bought a new house with
| a huge barn attached, so he could park his huge motor
| caravan in it. So, the analogy isn't too far fetched, IMHO.
|
| > On the other hand, we should not be ignoring efficiency
| for the end user solely in favor of efficiency for the
| developer.
|
| Neither do I. But the economic incentives are stacked
| differently.
| gecko wrote:
| I will say that a lot of that RAM is going to creature comforts
| that aren't about apps getting worse per se. For example,
| everything is running double buffered images and windows in
| HiDPI. The era you're talking about, applications were in
| charge of redrawing their window whenever you exposed their
| contents/tabbed back to them/etc. If they genuinely needed
| double buffering, they'd need to do it themselves, so apps
| rarely did. Plus side, less RAM, downside, you would get gray
| nondescript windows and redraw errors when moving and resizing
| windows. Nowadays, Windows/macOS/Linux instead keep double- (or
| even triple-) buffered copies of all that. Throw on all the
| HiDPI images and whatnot, and you've already used up more RAM
| just on that one thing than the old apps used to take. But you
| can tab between apps with full previews, and you don't get gray
| blobs and tearing when an app is overloaded. Other things, like
| 64-bit pointers, or static linking becoming a common way to
| deal with DLL hell (sigh), also add RAM, but are also solving
| real problems.
|
| I'm not really defending all those decisions or anything,
| beyond that it's not simply a case of lazy devs or whatnot. We
| made trade-offs as a community that genuinely improved the user
| experience. I may not agree with all of them, but I get why
| they happened, and don't spend a lot of time wondering why we
| used to need fewer resources.
| layer8 wrote:
| HiDPI isn't really a significant factor. Electron apps still
| use crazy amounts of RAM in 1080p. Same for double buffering
| I would assume.
| dep_b wrote:
| I was always under the assumption that application windows
| were all rendered as separate layers on the GPU and the
| artifacts on older Windowsen were related to pre-GPU UI
| rendering.
|
| So rather than occupying main RAM they're on the GPU RAM and
| main RAM just orchestrates.
| itomato wrote:
| A 1 MB webpage was rare even from Frontpage 98 or ColdFusion.
|
| Is that enough for an ad today?
| guestbest wrote:
| Well, the systems had little to no security. Also the
| multimedia resolution was not very good
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Security and multimedia decoders really add up to a gig or
| more of memory? I doubt it.
|
| I think that computers got faster so programmers got dumber.
| imaginationra wrote:
| I loved Hotline. It was one of my favorite things on the web back
| then.
|
| I chatted with/shared resources with other
| film/video/animation/audio types on a few great specialty servers
| back then.
|
| Have never found anything else like it since besides Retroshare
| for functionality but the UI/UX in Hotline is far superior.
| armagon wrote:
| This sounds so interesting.
|
| Are there other all-in-one platforms?
|
| It reminds me a little of Citadel/UX (https://citadel.org) or
| software for the Reticulum Network (https://reticulum.network/man
| ual/gettingstartedfast.html#nom...).
| c22 wrote:
| Freenet has a similar vibe.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Is there a way to use a monospace font in this client? A lot of
| the servers use ASCII art, but the client's default (only?) font
| is proportional.
| tagban wrote:
| Hello everyone! Awesome to see the action and joining. I've been
| quietly working with Ari to ensure Hotline continues by
| maintaining the original domains required for clients to work. I
| also run http://hlwiki.com and http://bigredh.com (designed to
| work with classic browsers) which links to all of the open source
| and closed source active projects surrounding hotline. Enjoy!
| tonymet wrote:
| Thank you for keeping the spirit of Hotline alive. Despite
| innovations, nothing can replace the vibe of that era. Good to
| see Hotline carry on.
| superkuh wrote:
| The hotline scene still exists in some form. The trackers are
| still up. Old clients still work even if new ones don't but it's
| nice to see some more development. I am actually connected to a
| hotline server right not using the HotlineClient 1.9.1 - Super
| Tracker Edition under wine. I miss the active days of the early
| 2000s Hotline communities though. Inverted Reality, Dark Nebula,
| etc.
|
| Anyone else here have a custom icon in the Badmoon pack(s)? I
| was/am Hotline icon: 3582 , ctrl-f12 "hammeregg" + #number in
| most clients once you've installed the pack.
| tonymet wrote:
| It seems this post was embargoed for about a day. I had almost
| lost faith in Hackernews community for not recognizing the
| splendor of resurrecting Hotline. Glad to see this project get
| the admiration it deserves.
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