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

131–140 of 250 posts

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#131

Post by pmlnr »

justusw wrote: post #128
pmlnr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early Trillian ~0.72; that one I really loved; I found Miranda later, so that I never really used. A while ago I digged around in my computer and collected _all_ the chat logs I was able to find: Trillian, MSN, Pidgin, Empathy, Thunderbird, XChat, Facebook, and normalized them to plain text. They were in all sorts of formats: line-by-line XML, JSON, per file JSON, per file XML, text, HTML. (I had to exclude Skype…

Most versions of Skype use SQLite for local storage, if that is of any help!

I didn't know that; I'll take a look. This was the Linux version 2.x era, mostly.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#132

Post by antisthenes »

drinchev wrote: post #113
mikey_p wrote: post #64

The craziest thing about all of this, is that my number 7672xxx still works! Every few years I download the client, and my username and password from the late 90s is still valid. This is no small feat in the age of shutdowns and spin-offs. In other news, WebRings still exists as well.

Just a question. I see more of the commenters have posted their ICQ UIDs with the last digits hidden, like yours ( xxx in the end ). Is there a particular reason for not revealing it?

The 'x's actually appear to him as numbers because it's his UID.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#133

Post by kpil »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #103
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…

>6) C core-code is written in old-school style and I liked that; How "old-school" are we talking? Like K&R-C style or what?

K&R C must surely be too old. It was starting to be old in the early 90s, and I think Linux and GNU where quite progressive in the days.

But, hum hum, What is considered non-old-school really modern C? Are there any new non-trivial C programs or systems anymore?

I look at the Linux kernel and some drivers occasionally, and possibly do some changes in some drivers and tools related to DVB and media, but I never look at "new" C code.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#134

Post by takeda »

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.

> And looking it up reveals I was stupid enough to fill in my birthday correctly for it, which still displays publicly to this day.

You're implying that there's a search page where you can search accounts. I forgot what's number of my account and am curious if there's anyone who that I know that still uses it.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#135

Post by takeda »

smsm42 wrote: post #99
swozey wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now that it's a deserted place I doubt it is worth much.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#136

Post by smsm42 »

takeda wrote: post #135
smsm42 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now that it's a deserted place I doubt it is worth much.

Well, another chance of being rich missed!

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#137

Post by kpil »

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.

I had (or might have even) a low 6 digit number, and I think I remember that 5-digit numbers were sold for much more than $200.

A few might have been sold for around $5000 or even more. I am not sure though... I just remember that it was an unbelievably high number....

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#139

Post by spydum »

flukus wrote: post #117
j2bax wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it was 100% fun, no malicious intent. Judging by the downvotes, people don't find it amusing. I can see that now that I'm not a dumb teenage... but it made for fond memories none the less! And the fact that pretty non-technical 15 year olds could pull that off in a matter of minutes, probably drove companies to take security a bit more seriously (hopefully)!

It was pre digital photography, so not like anyone had private nudes on their hard drive to poke through.

I can 100% attest that is is a false assumption.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#140

Post by Lutzb »

FigBug wrote: post #9

Around 2000 I got annoyed with the ads and crap in ICQ, so I wrote Miranda ICQ, now called Miranda IM ( http://www.miranda-im.org/ ) based on libicq. One of my main inspirations to write the app was I wanted to connect a chatbot to ICQ to harass my friends, but the standard API wouldn't allow sending messages. So I added a plugin API, connected the MegaHAL chatbot and good times ensued. I lost interest in Miranda sho…

Thanks you so much for creating Miranda. Small, unintrusive, fast.
Post reply on HN