An oral history of the AIM away message

I grew up with AIM and remember, even before AIM, the AOL CDs stockpiled in my house. They were quite handy as coasters and lids to wine glasses in the summer when the fruit flies came out. My parents still have some lying around for those purposes, not at all the classiest solutions but free and better than the landfill? There isn't even a CD drive in that house anymore.

More on topic, AIM as something to grow up with was ehhh. I kind of wish it didn't exist so I would have been more forced to push my parents to drive me to friends houses instead of hogging the family computer. Today I feel like the modern equivalents are probably Discord+Fortnite/Minecraft/whatever on personal machines which from my armchair looks a lot better from a social perspective.

This was a great read. I liked the part about the AIM team 'stealing' the running man logo.

We talk about work-life balance, but these projects had to have been amazing for people to dedicate chunks of their lives to them.

I wonder if we'll ever read stories about building slack and look back it so fondly.

when my friends and i figured out how to send someone a link that would turn on their away message (and profile i believe, cant remember) with whatever we wanted to it to say chaos ensued.

They don't get into it, but the AIM host infrastructure was based on the event-based non-blocking libraries written by Lippke. The host complex was a distributed hash table (routed on relevant data, e.g. Screen name, ICQ number), with the extra step that you can migrate the in-memory state from one host to another while still taking incoming work. Quite a powerful infrastructure to build highly-available services. Only oddity is that you needed to have the clients (AIM clients and internal datacenter callers) have the ability to detach from one end point and re-attach to another end point when the bucket containing doing work for that client migrated to new hardware.

In the layer you were writing code, it was routed by the thing you hashed on, so it was sort of SDN like in its ability to separate the application state from the physical hardware. Amazingly good server technology. AOL had all kinds of cool tech - dynamically assigned (/24) subnets, IP Tunnels from the client, giant compression/caching farms that essentially cached all the static assets on the internet, etc. etc. In the 90s that is; those machines Eric was deploying onto were less powerful than your smart phone.

The early days of Facebook chat where god awful, with tons of missed messages and things not syncing within the web and 3rd party clients. AIM (and even Yahoo and MSN) were over a decade ahead of that garbage before FB eventually caught up with having a messaging system that didn't suck ass.

In fact most things Facebook did originally it did poorly: poor quality photo storage (Flickr offered high quality or even original quality for a fee), garbage messaging, etc. It eventually caught up after it got big, because everyone was already using it .. and all the other platforms lost market share or became niche.