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.
I remember in the early days of Mac OS X when i installed KDE. Was pretty surreal.
Then i spent to much time to try create a DarwinBSD distro with KDE.
While not Miyazaki (but still Studio Ghibli), Isao Takahata's films Grave of the Fireflies (and to some extent, Princess Kaguya), isn't really some ”feel good” movies. Optimistic is the last thing i would describes those two masterpieces.
I remember how insanely quick the GUI on the first MacOS X Server (1.0) version was. It was mostly (simple explanation) a classic MacOS theme slapped on NeXTStep with some additional things added (and stripped). Then when the consumer version was released, it looked like a ”Hollywood OS” or a fancy Kaleidoscope scheme (3r party themes for classic MacOS). But it was slow as…
So the transition for me took a while at the start. Think it was Jaguar, or maybe Panther when i moved 100% to MacOS X.
Not feature-rich as Little Snitch.
However, it's free and open source. I primarily use Little Snitch for my iMac and MBP. But use LuLu as well on other machines.
Can highly recommend all the other apps Patrick Wardle (Objective-See) has developed.
As well as a FTP app for macOS, Sharing service for the Opera browser, Microsoft Flow, Samsung Flow and so on. While it's a word used all over the place, i would try to name it to something more ”unique”.
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