Hotline KDX
Hotline/KDX
Many years ago, long before the internet became, lived an era where some people would run or access bulletin board systems (BBS) and most would use their modem and dial up to a BBS in order to obtain new software, send/receive messages with other people, and generally exist in “online” communities. The BBS was entirely text mode, you would dial up someone’s computer, spend some time looking for, downloading, and sometimes uploading files.
After the internet became available for the likes of you and me, the general public, not limited to colleges and universities, a new way of communication was developed, using internet protocols, faster, more secure, and multitaskable (I may have just made that word up, but you know what I mean by it 😄)
The BBS became the Hotline server/client, BBSv2 if you will. This provided a graphical window set way of connecting to a server, transferring files, reading/posting messages, a realtime chat room or rooms, even voice chat! All of this was from the beginning encrypted (unless for some reason that was disabled to make things faster due to the tech at the time).
This is the first thing you will see when launching KDX, the menu window; small, simple, does what it says on the tin. Let’s connect to a server, conveniently I have one bookmarked already 👍 Clicking the “Commands” button at the top will produce the following context menu to appear.
From here we click either “Connect To” to expand the address book inline, or we can load the address book by, yes you guessed it, clicking “Address Book”, lets do that now.
As you can see I have a few bookmarks, so let’s just connect to the first item on the list, “0: thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE” 😅 To do this, just click on the name and it will automatically connect (using the credentials you saved with the address book entry).
Upon connecting, if a greeting is enabled on the server, you will first be shown this.
ooh pretty l33t green Once we have read the greeting, we can just close it with the “X” at the top left corner of the window.
Back at the main menu interface, we can now click things like “Chat” to load the chat directory window;
Let’s go into the “Public Chat” room
Oh, there’s no-one but me in here right now, how lonely! 🤣 You may notice that this window has a tab for the server connected, if you’re connected to multiple servers (yes this is a thing) then each window will have a tab or directory tree for each server. Neato!
Now lets look at the “News Groups”. Clicking on “News” in the main menu window will launch the news reader.
Clicking on “General News” we can see the (currently) only news post this server has. Yes I know, it’s a work in progress, don’t judge!
Hit the “+” to expand the message
That’s better, now we can read some news. The most used part of the server in my opinion is the file browser, because heck everyone needs warez, so how ya gonna get some? In the file browser! Let’s have a look and see what’s available on this server. Will we find that elusive MOD file? 🤞
A-ha! It looks like there is a nice section for Tracker Music, I bet the file I need is in there. I won’t spoil the surprise, if you wish to look yourself you are welcome to.
That’s about all I wish to say about this for the introduction of Hotline/KDX, if you wish to read some other write-up’s about it, here is a good link to get you more informed; KDX, the last of the Hotline. Complete Russian user and admin guide / Sudo Null IT News
I hope that you find this page interesting and useful. If you wish to connect to thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE KDX server, first download one of the clients and then you can connect via the hostname kdx.erb.pw and leaving the username and password fields empty for guest access – looking forward to seeing you in the chat room!
Clients available (YMMV): Linux // MacOS X // Windows
If you run your own KDX server, consider listing on our KDX tracker, the address of which is tracker.erb.pw