211–220 of 250 posts
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Difference is, the gay community (or some subset of it that I don't know the size of) has always had it's quick hook up methods.
There is still substantial reasons to be quick about it when you are out in public if you are gay, with exception for a few small geographical areas.
Did anyone else used to "hack" people on ICQ? If I recall correctly, ICQ would expose users IP address if they didn't intentionally hide it. My friend and I would get to chatting with strangers and then exchange photos... Only ours wasn't a photo, it was something that opened a backdoor into their computer that would allow us to take over their PC. We never did anything harmful but might have gotten a few people in t…
I think that is basically how I got into the deeper end of 'computing': learning about IPs, TCP/IP, playing around with scripts and hacking together my own (or more usually hacking around someone else's code to make it do what I wanted it to do).
I sort of miss those days of the internet. I am not sure how to describe it but it felt more free and less restricted. People around me in real life weren't as familiar with it either so it had this weird vibe around it; a lot of it sounded like magic to them. Whenever you mentioned 'The Internet' there was an air of mystery around it.
The sad reality is that ICQ was more functional and cross platform than IM are on skype 20 years later...
Thanks, Microsoft!
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ICQ happened to figure something out - girls wrote boys as well, I remember getting messages from strangers as often as initiating those. Anyway, it was more about talking than about romantic relationship. Not many people expected to ever meet their virtual friends. You can definitely ruin that, for example, if you do not randomize well enough and a small subset of user base gets too much attention.
You sure those girls were girls? Remember, this was the internet back when men were men and women were men and children were FBI agents.
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538342. Had a weak / compromised password for ages, I'm surprised to have been able to access my account and change to a stronger password. I'm not sure the popularity of 6 digit accounts and the password compromise times overlapped much though. Had some great times chatting to people all around the world on ICQ. I think I still have a couple of FB friends from that era. I was bouncing an idea of an IRC like pager ap…
I'm surprised I remembered the password at all, and I can't change it without giving out a mobile phone number for a SMS. No thanks.
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…
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>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?
I forgot to mention an important fact about ICQ core code-base. The core framework for ICQ was actually written by AOL long before ICQ was born. I.e. they developed general framework for scalable distributed systems. So some comments in the code are dated as early as 1992. I didn't mean formatting style but general flavor of how programs was written at these days. I can't put it into words, it's better to just see th…
>the forerunner of all messengers ...erm... IRC? write? talk? CBBS? No?
IRC did not have persistent user identities. (IRC+memoserv perhaps, but that "feels" more like email than like a messenger). The others weren't internet-wide were they?
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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.