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 venture capital 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. In 2001 Hotline Communications lost the bulk of its VC funding, and went out of business later that year. 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.

Since 2008 some Hotliners have been slowly purchasing the defunct URLs so that they now have the main server, tracker, and BigRedH.com. This has allowed a revival of sorts while many open source clients have popped up over the last few years. Many active projects now have led to a revival of sorts seeing over 30 servers on the main tracker (HLTracker.com).

All new clients and old have been preserved on the new wiki site (moved from advertisement based wiki hosting to hlwiki.com. The community has since flourished and new servers pop up every day with new clients allowing modern computer support while still having older clients for 20+ year old computer support.