ibmman | Tracker-Tracker finally goes dark. And a short history of my experience with Hotline.

A full ten years after I started using Hotline to browse the files at the basement of the internet without having to trudge through IRC, the number one site for indexing Hotline trackers has finally been taken offline. I noticed it this past weekend when I decided randomly to go there- http://www.tracker-tracker.com/ apparently they took it off on July 7th. Though Hotline itself hasn't been used really much in the last five years, Tracker-Tracker surprisingly stayed up to service what was left of the die-hard members of that community. Noble in a way, if you want to assume that perhaps those people were only sharing open-source software, or perhaps using Hotline as a collaborative platform for accomplishing something, or maybe because of the social environment, with the built-in chat system being pretty good. More realistically, those remaining Trackers probably had porn, and Tracker-Tracker made it easier to find. I'm sure there were a couple that were mostly Linux distros.

I'll always remember Hotline as a tool that led to some fun times- how else would I have experienced the joy of banner surfing in order to find passwords for download-enabled accounts? Then in the process finding that the banners had changed and so after a half hour of clicking on a whole series of banner ads (and hence generating revenue for the people running the tracker) not ending up being able to piece together the password after all. Or being kicked and banned by admins when your download is 99% after transferring for two days at 2 Kb/s on dial-up. For most of the time I used Hotline, it was probably over dial-up. I forget when exactly we got the cable modem, but that seriously did bring a whole new perspective with it. I almost wish I could go back to thinking that 100 Kb/s is fast, it would help give me that satisfied and joyous feeling of "WOW! This is fast!" again. I'll probably have to wait until I can get my own T3 to experience that again though.

Though the first few years of college, I used Hotline about as much as AIM because it turns out it's pretty good for file sharing between friends, and it was at the time much more reliable for it than was AIM (for example, file transfer resume actually worked). A few of us used our own private tracker, and it worked pretty well. AIM slowly improved though, and with the emergence of Social Media that didn't totally suck (which would be services that are not Myspace) there was less of a need to use Hotline as a personal chat server. One day we all just stopped using it.

My introduction to Hotline was through Kevn St. Amand at Wooster, who was Tech Center head after whats-his-name (I forget....) was caught up in and kicked out for that whole mess with a bunch of seniors being accused of marijuana possession. Kevin was also a great example of a super Apple fanboy, and was an early adopter for the original Apple Airport. With the Airport and his iBook G3 (color was Tangerine i think) he was able to download Greatful Dead live concert recordings on Hotline from nearly anywhere in Coburn. That was pretty darn spiffy back in 2000.

So yeah, thank you former Tracker-Tracker admins for your efforts. Though I wish I had chosen to do more productive things in High School, such as studying and homework. Banner surfing didn't much help me with that.