Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 250 posts

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#91

Post by digi_owl »

mahyarm wrote: post #77
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #26

Everybody is missing the elephant in the room with ICQ, which is why it was popular: In my mid 20's, i'd come back from the pub drunk, login, search for girls online now near me and send them messages. Was usually somebody drunk at the other end, had a few fleeting relationships from that. Nothing since, including Facebook, has had that same immediacy.

Tinder is kind of like that? Wechat has something similar in China. I worked at a messaging company, and I found out those kind of 'unsolicited date messaging' features are a really good way to scare away your female users pretty quickly.

IRC had the same problem. Jump onto a "social" channel with a feminine sounding nick and you would get the screen covered in ASL queries.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#92

Post by jeduardo »

swozey wrote: post #50
drinchev wrote: post #44

My ICQ UID is 15584496 . I still remember people buying less-digits or easy-to-remember digits accounts for real money. Gosh, I just logged in. Kudos for not auto-deleting my account for so many years.

163766. Had tons of people asking to buy it. Too bad I can't even log in since it's tied to my email address from 4th or 5th grade. I think the numbers started at 100000. Prior to that, elementary school, I used PowWow and Mplayer to socialize with pretty much only Californians.. since everyone on the internet back then lived in CA. That was a weird time. I of course was 18 for.. oh, 10 years. I believe I've met 2-3…

157xxx here. Logged in just for kicks and found out that yes, the password still works. :)

I don't remember meeting anyone with a lower number than mine, although I was aware that, at least on the global user directory, there were 2 people in my city with a lower number, both related.

In my case I got last online times for several people (mobile app) but mostly all from 2015. I wonder if that's in any way related with the govt blocking WhatsApp that year...

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#93

Post by oxymoron »

4ad wrote: post #85
hal9000xp wrote: post #74

I'm former ICQ backend developer (2010 - 2014). I started to work at Mail.Ru in 2010, when Mail.Ru bought ICQ from AOL. I was enjoyed working with ICQ backend code-base written by AOL (although to be honest not all code was high quality). Here are some quick facts about ICQ backend infrastructure: 1) ICQ servers has over 2'700'000 lines of code which is written in C and C++; 2) ICQ has its own TCP/IP implementation w…

> ICQ has its own TCP/IP implementation which works in the user space; Mind expanding a little bit why is that?

Probably to minimize context switching?

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#94

Post by pimeys »

4ad wrote: post #85
hal9000xp wrote: post #74

I'm former ICQ backend developer (2010 - 2014). I started to work at Mail.Ru in 2010, when Mail.Ru bought ICQ from AOL. I was enjoyed working with ICQ backend code-base written by AOL (although to be honest not all code was high quality). Here are some quick facts about ICQ backend infrastructure: 1) ICQ servers has over 2'700'000 lines of code which is written in C and C++; 2) ICQ has its own TCP/IP implementation w…

> ICQ has its own TCP/IP implementation which works in the user space; Mind expanding a little bit why is that?

Could it be because of the age of the codebase? When ICQ started the available TCP/IP stacks were not good enough and it doesn't make sense to refactor the whole project to use the system stack.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#95

Post by toyg »

I met my wife on ICQ.

It's a shame AOL ruined it with ads and overall crappiness, it could have been Facebook - a decade before FB was even a figment in Zuck's imagination. To be fair, it didn't help that MS did their "leveraging Windows" play; around 2002, I realized "normal" people had gone to Messenger because it was "just there" and it worked better with firewalls. But that was it, the IM scene was never as cohesive again -MSN, C6, Jabber, Yahoo, they all split the network.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#96

Post by kaivi »

drinchev wrote: post #44

My ICQ UID is 15584496 . I still remember people buying less-digits or easy-to-remember digits accounts for real money. Gosh, I just logged in. Kudos for not auto-deleting my account for so many years.

180662, and I am still using it!

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#97

Post by hal9000xp »

pimeys wrote: post #94
4ad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ICQ has its own TCP/IP implementation which works in the user space; Mind expanding a little bit why is that?

Could it be because of the age of the codebase? When ICQ started the available TCP/IP stacks were not good enough and it doesn't make sense to refactor the whole project to use the system stack.

Yes, that's mostly true.

In early days, native TCP/IP stacks wasn't good at handling so many simultaneous connections as ICQ needed to handle.

So AOL just wrote their own TCP/IP stack (I think they used this implementation not only in ICQ).

In modern days, it's legacy.

I think they already removed this stack since I left company.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#98

Post by Rondom »

shoover wrote: post #61
eterm wrote: post #5

I still remember my ICQ number and I haven't used it since 99b. And looking it up reveals I was stupid enough to fill in my birthday correctly for it, which still displays publicly to this day.

Ah, at last via web.icq.com I was able to recover my account, update my email address, and reset my password. Looks like my contact list was wiped at some point over the years, though.

If I remember it correctly, server-side contact lists were only introduced in 2001 or so. In 99b it was stored on the client. That's my faint memory speaking, though.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#99

Post by smsm42 »

swozey wrote: post #75
SwellJoe wrote: post #73

"(UINs used to be rather expensive, by the way)" Anyone know what the author means by "expensive" in this context? It's a six digit number, exclusive to ICQ, how could it be "expensive"?

A handful of years ago (~10) I was offered BTC (way before their $100+ value) and I think $75-200 for my 6 digit number. People used to sell Myspace UIDs as well, Facebook too before they converted to usernames.

Wow, I wonder who would pay such kind of money. I probably still have my old ICQ number/pwd in backups somewhere. I wonder if it is worth something.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#100

Post by WA »

drinchev wrote: post #44

My ICQ UID is 15584496 . I still remember people buying less-digits or easy-to-remember digits accounts for real money. Gosh, I just logged in. Kudos for not auto-deleting my account for so many years.

The trick was this: back then you'd check the associated email addresses of low ICQ numbers. If it was Yahoo, Hotmail and the like, there was a small chance that the email address expired and could be re-registered.

The forgot password thing then gave you access to the ICQ account.

Post reply on HN