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An oral history of the AIM away message

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Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#31

Post by rconti »

alphis001 wrote: post #29

This is BS. 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]…

> From the beginning of AOL there was instant messaging. Barry noticed that users had created scripts to query whether their friends were online or not. So he decided we should just let them know all the time. He commissioned an initial version of the Buddy List, that worked within AOL. It didn’t scale well, though—we called it the Buggy List.

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#32

Post by xxr »

logicchains wrote: post #20
JimiofEden wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As described by my favorite animation ever: Adam: Hey STUD! Adam: LOL j/k Duncan: Hey. Adam: What's going on?? Adam: ;) Duncan: Not much. brb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjVugzSR7HA for the curious.

Unabridged version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB-gYr49Y

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#33

Post by turdnagel »

rconti wrote: post #26
fourstar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Conclusion does not follow. Many of us skipped AOL entirely. That's not to say there weren't interesting things to do there if you chose to use it, or were forced to use it by circumstance.

Of course it follows. The OP said "no self-respecting hacker" would use AOL/AIM, which is a not only a "no true scotsman" fallacy but untrue. I, too was introduced to the world of programming through AOL chatrooms, and there were some really incredible hackers/programmers who hung out in them.

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#34

Post by icedchai »

lanstin wrote: post #17

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. On…

AIM was rock solid. It made me sad to see it go away a couple years back.

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#35

Post by petropolisful »

alphis001 wrote: post #29

This is BS. 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]…

>If you remember Fate/FateX, Sublime, Paladin, Magenta

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#37

Post by patrioticaction »

petropolisful wrote: post #35
alphis001 wrote: post #29

This is BS. 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]…

>If you remember Fate/FateX, Sublime, Paladin, Magenta Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

Punting was my first exposure to cyber warfare, miss those days

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#39

Post by rubicon33 »

empath75 wrote: post #25

Slack was probably the last straw that broke aim. We used aim internally at aol for work related messaging up until slack came out and people started using it one team at a time. It got to the point that so many teams were using it that aol bought an enterprise license for it and that was basically it for aim as a product.

Didn't AIM for consumers shut down long before slack came out?

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#40

Post by popz41 »

djsumdog wrote: post #19
lanstin wrote: post #17

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. On…

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 orig…

I believe messages were originally built on SMTP, then it moved to XMPP, then it all moved to MQTT
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