Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An oral history of the AIM away message

invisionapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#51

Post by danesparza »

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…

I love that you mention ICQ number and the article posits that "AOL Instant Messenger was where it all started".

ICQ (the original chat client) was around for a full year before AIM launched.

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#52

Post by ymerej »

Speaking of ICQ, I remember when AOL bought out ICQ and had a huge engineering success when they pulled the switch and all of sudden, ICQ users were seamlessly on the AIM infrastructure. When you think of the sizes of those networks it was really amazing.

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#54

Post by kevinslashslash »

smegmasamurai wrote: post #15

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.

I remember sending people a link to change their buddy icon

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#55

Post by kevinslashslash »

peterwwillis wrote: post #9

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 had a similar experience. A friend gave me a free shell account so I built a little battle.net chat bot in Perl. Later I branched out into AIM bots, one had jokes/fortune but also a student directory (commandeered from a school server with lax security). The other would sign on like 60 different accounts and on my command mass message someone, it'd crash some versions of AOL and just be a real annoyance for AIM users.

The Perl library was `Net::AIM::TOC` and later `Net::OSCAR`

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#56

Post by benbristow »

popz41 wrote: post #40
djsumdog wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Quite an interesting thread posted last New Years here of how Facebook scale for demand at New Years Eve when everyone is sending Happy New Years messages at midnight

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780741

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#57

Post by dandigangi »

JimiofEden wrote: post #5
dandigangi wrote: post #4

This was about 90% of the conversations my friends and I had: Them: "hey whats up" Me: "nm you?" Them: "nm" Me: "cool" EOL

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.

Hahaha

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#58

Post by ellius »

I really wish iPhones had away messages for iMessage and/or SMS. It can seem like you're intentionally being a dick if you don't respond promptly, so it'd be nice to just make it clear you've chosen to be not available instead of this weird uncertain state that seems to be the default. Bonus points if you could join and leave group chats seamlessly like AIM chat rooms.

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#59

Post by reaperducer »

ellius wrote: post #58

I really wish iPhones had away messages for iMessage and/or SMS. It can seem like you're intentionally being a dick if you don't respond promptly, so it'd be nice to just make it clear you've chosen to be not available instead of this weird uncertain state that seems to be the default. Bonus points if you could join and leave group chats seamlessly like AIM chat rooms.

I don't think this is quite what you're looking for, but it's possible to set a custom auto-responding message when the phone is in do not disturb mode. I use this when I'm driving.

Re: An oral history of the AIM away message

#60

Post by reaperducer »

wDcBKgt66V8WDs wrote: post #11

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…

lids to wine glasses in the summer when the fruit flies came out

Are fruit flies not able to fly through the big hole in the middle of the CDROM?

Post reply on HN