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 was designed in 1996 and known as "hotwire" by Australian programmer Adam Hinkley (known online by his username, "Hinks"), then 17 years old, as a classic Mac OS application.

Six other fans of Hotline, David Murphy, Alex King, Phil Hilton, Jason Roks, David Bordin, and Terrance Gregory, joined Adam Hinkley's efforts to promote and market the Hotline programs, working day and night and using the company's own products to stay in touch from across the US, Canada, and Australia.

Eventually, Canadian Jason Roks approached Adam Hinkley and encouraged him to move to Toronto, where Hotline Communications, Ltd. was incorporated.

Server admins would earn money per click and in return offer pirated software, music, movies and pornography to users.

At the end of the 1990s, by then outdated Hotline software started to gradually fade, as peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella and Kazaa became increasingly popular.

[7] The Hotline applications were distributed as shareware and combined chat, message board and file transfer capabilities and operated using a client/server (not peer-to-peer) model.

The protocol was reverse engineered by the internet community, leading to a wide variety of third-party clients being written in RealBasic, one of the few easy-to-use development environments available on the Macintosh at the time.

Hotline's largest community Mixed Blood, started by Prime Chuck and SAINT in 1998, is still active to this day on Wired.