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Man, loved ICQ. I used to text chat to the early hours with this Greek girl I met online. It was platonic but we got quite close and exchange physical letters and actually met up a couple of times. Good times.
I do miss casually texting with people on the computer rather than the phone, and I don't think it's only due to nostalgia or having more leisure time back then:
- If someone was online, it would typically be a good time for a casual, interactive chat. Texting someone on the phone is (at least for me) rarely "live", because it usually happens at an inconvenient time for one of the parties.
- Much faster to type, and easier to copy-paste stuff from other places. Can communicate almost as effortlessly as a spoken conversation.
- Easier to multi-task in case of a slow reply.
I don't enjoy texting on the phone. Millennial logging out for the last time. AFK BRB.
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Oh, did I mix it up with MSN then, or maybe early Skype? Or did this possibly happen after the OSCAR migration? I vividly remember being amazed by offline delivery in Jabber, so at least one of ICQ or MSN must have not had it for me to even notice.
Circa 2000 or so, when AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ were all flourishing, Yahoo had already added offline messages. ICQ, I think also had them, though it was probably configurable, I recall the client having a half dozen screens of options. At that moment, neither MSN nor AIM had it yet. AIM eventually did add it, though I don't recall if it was added to AIM after ICQ de-merged from the AIM backend.
For everyone proudly displaying their old ICQ numbers, just be aware that there are still sites that have some of the info tied to the numbers archived (presumably what was made public/status). So, there may be some easily-access publicly identifiable information that you don't want associated with your current HN username. (I just did a search and I found that my old icq# had a phone number linked to it)
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The "proper" way of using ICQ from your phone was Jimm, an unofficial Java client. I was the cool kid with a patched Siemens phone, which could run native apps, so I used NatICQ.elf instead.
Haha, what Siemens phone could you patch to run native apps on? I must have switched to Nokia/Symbian before that became a thing. (That could run both native S60 and J2ME apps – basically infinite apps and games!)
My next phone was a Nokia 5800, one of the last Symbian ones.
Don't ask me how I remember this number that I haven't used in 20-odd years, but maybe that alludes to the impact it made on the community at large.
RIP ICQ
1303789 Serious question - why do so many people remember our ICQ numbers? I don’t remember what user-facing function it served. Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect? I suppose it also came at a time for a lot of us where things seemed to wedge into our brains more easily.
I cannot even remember the birthdays of people close to me, let alone any phone numbers except my own. But I still remember that f*king 12-digit international phone number from almost 40 years ago...
oh and of course I remember my ICQ number ;-)
Human memory works in a weird way
6447137 I was really surprised when a recovery mechanism was launched many years ago. My account wasnt comprised. It still had the same dumb password from way back -- my first highschool girlfriends name and a number.