Comment by Chanderton

First Class and Hotline. Server/Client.

First Class had broader userbase, such as schools and organizations in the groupware/collaborative segment (but also Mac user groups and so on).

First Class was a comercial product (the server). It had filesharing (UL/DL), it had it's own desktop, mail, chat, IM, voice mail and more. Started out on Mac, but later became cross platform. Still you can find presentations and setup guides on old forgotten University/Schools websites.

Hotline on the other hand, was very easy to setup and also pretty lightweight. It had a server tracker. In the beginning it was Mac only. Lot's of warez servers, but also different (non-warez) communities. It had filesharing (ul/dl from the file area), chat and a newsboard. The decline came after it's developers released the Windows versions. Most servers became clickbait pron/warez with malware etc. People started to move away to web and it Hotline basically died out.

Now, there was some open source/clone projects that kept the spirit alive. But after a few years, web forums, torrents and other p2p-apps took over. But there is some servers running still in 2025 and open source server/client software still developed.

Compared to First Class. Hotline was the Wild West. It only took 15 minutes to set up your own server and announce it on a server tracker (or keep it private).

When i use Discord and other apps/services, it's not hard to think of FC/HL. But then, they were solutions of it's time.

More about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6691-hotline-connect-cli...

https://github.com/mierau/hotline

https://github.com/jhalter/mobius