21–30 of 68 posts
AIM was one of those unique things, it was 'cool' even though it was created by AOL. AOL was the lamest online service, it was what your grandma used. No self-respecting hacker or power user would use AOL. But everyone used AIM.
EDIT: lest I forget AIM pr: darkside
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 wi…
Before there were AOL CDs, there were AOL Floppy disks. There were gold to me. I had no money to buy floppies and I had stuff that I wanted to, uh, save. I think I still have an AOL Floppy in the original shrink-wrap somewhere.
Rinse and repeat until I finally had something worth, uh, saving on a floppy disk.
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 wi…
So I was young enough to not know a time before instant messaging as I graduated from high school in 2005. Are you saying that I'm missing out because I never knew what it was like to not have AIM constantly at my fingertips?
Because I see kids today are absolutely missing out because they never have to be bored and make their own fun.
The first successful software project I made was an AIM chat bot. I wanted to receive messages from friends while I was offline (because, remember, you had to dial into the internet and tie up a phone line...). I was amazed by the utility of store-and-forward network architectures, but I was surprised that SMTP was the only high level protocol that seemed to use it. Why couldn't something send me my messages when I c…
I played it in late elementary school and you could write your own levels -- I think they were called "dreams" -- that people could visit with all kinds of conditional logic.
You know how as a kid you'd sometimes daydream about your future? I daydreamed that I would later become a computer programmer and be able to look back and my messing around in Furcadia was my start. For some reason I thought being a programmer was a fancy job that was somehow out of reach.
Now I'm a computer programmer... and yeah, tooling around with computers in the 90s was my "start."
AIM was one of those unique things, it was 'cool' even though it was created by AOL. AOL was the lamest online service, it was what your grandma used. No self-respecting hacker or power user would use AOL. But everyone used AIM.
You must be young. The AOL hacker scene was quite vibrant. Mass mailers, PR room: server, server when server got banned, cerver. Plus the plethora of exploits. Go to archive.org and lookup aol-files.com. EDIT: lest I forget AIM pr: darkside
AIM was one of those unique things, it was 'cool' even though it was created by AOL. AOL was the lamest online service, it was what your grandma used. No self-respecting hacker or power user would use AOL. But everyone used AIM.
Not in the UK, everyone used msn (or before that yahoo chat or ICQ)
The away message was invented by AOL "proggers" which included, amongst other features, the Away Message. This was long before AOL simply absorbed that feature. If you remember Fate/FateX, Sublime, Paladin, Magenta, and the other infinite number of tools many of them had this feature. AOL just copied it because like most awesome things, it was invented by the users' creativity.
AOHell4LYFE.
-~[1337 tewlz]~-
The article mentions the Newsfeed; I don't know how the AIM team thinks distributed status messages (or whatever?) are analogous to the news feed, nor the community sharing/commenting/photos/etc.
But one thing Facebook DID have, when it was curated, was links to EVERYTHING. You could see who was taking the same class as you, even the same section. You could see who lived in the same residence hall. You could search/sort/filter on EVERYTHING. It was amazing.