555655 :)
I wish internet didn't evolve. mIRC and ICQ were magical.
ICQ will stop working from June 26
331–340 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have similar sentimental memories of ICQ. One highlight was being able to connect to it from my phone for the first time; first on my first smartphone (Symbian), then from my "non-smart" Sony Ericsson that succeeded it, via some Java Jabber client and a Jabber-to-ICQ bridge! (Unfortunately nobody else that I knew had it on their phones, so I could only reach people in front of their PCs at home.) On the other hand,…
Being reachable only from a PC at home… man. Now that I miss. The whole lifestyle of having a clear distinction between being at the computer and not. Status messages for a time when “away” was a state of being you ever were . Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you. Simpler times for sure. Before we even had “wi-fi!”
I love how you could set different Away statuses for distinct individuals / groups.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#333All I can say is: "Uh oh!" https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4
tangentially related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0iqM_AnSuo
The ICQ Song, by Alchemy
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#334Reminds me of a simpler time when messaging was universal, not a Machiavellian marketing scheme to generate social friction in order to sell more phones.
Back when computing was a tool to make users' life better, not a way to profit off wasting their time by "engaging" them.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#335Reminds me of a simpler time when messaging was universal, not a Machiavellian marketing scheme to generate social friction in order to sell more phones.
Even when IM started to break because it was too awesome not to try to monopolize, Trillian (back in 2000!) showed how interoperability was superconvenient to rein in the nascent feudalism and give power back to the users... until the bigger players put a stop to that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software)
> until the bigger players put a stop to that
The problem is that the legal system is misused to prevent adversarial interoperability.
Adversarial interoperability was never explicitly welcomed by gatekeepers, but back then nobody would think of suing over it, nor prosecuting such a case.
Nowadays, copyright law is used as a reason to shut those things down, even when the copyrighted content is actually third-party user-generated content or content you do have a license to access since it's freely accessible using the official client.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#336243121 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
less than quarter mil number, that's very very early on! mine is over 3.8 million, and I created it relatively early on considering I was living in Europe :)
I think I remember my number because back then when you had to reinstall software or put it on new machine you always went by your number, instead of your email or username. That's why I think I still remember it :)
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#337This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address). But I had a low five digit user number, and built a lot of relationships on ICQ (some of which continue today!). It was my main method of electronic communication in college. I had romantic relationships live and die on ICQ. Another reminder of how things change o…
4125222 I still remember it but not the pass
42731249. I still remember this shit without any hesitation, incl. password. And have not used the service for 20 years either.
And then, I continuously forget the name of colleagues I see at least every other day.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#338Even though it was mostly just Russians wanting to practice their English last time I used it a couple of decades ago I will miss this service. 9805028 What I really miss is the era when every chat service was on an open protocol so you could have a single app that supported everybody no matter what service they used.
All chat platforms (that I can remember) that were popular around that time used proprietary protocols, including ICQ. Everyone I knew preferred third-party clients to the official one, and these clients would sometimes break because ICQ kept changing tiny details in the protocol to try to force users to use the official client. It never worked, of course, because updates that fixed compatibility would usually come w…
I guess not open open, but at least they weren't behind cryptographic walls.
It is an embarassment that in 2024 you still can't send someone an iMessage from a PC or Android phone. Shoot, messaging from a PC in general is hard. No easy SMS access, and even third party apps often have stupid things like "the app is actually running on your phone but you can forward message to some flaky and bloated electron thing on a PC if you really must."
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
4125222 I still remember it but not the pass
141571088 I find it amusing that I still remember this right off the bat despite not having used it for 15 years, but I don't remember my phone number from the same time period.
I've kept the same phone number since 1998. Incidentally, I still remember my phone number from 26 years ago.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't remember, but I don't think MSN had offline messages. And I don't think ICQ lost offline messaging in the OSCAR transition, IIRC, ICQ moved to OSCAR with offline messages, then AIM got them, then AIM and ICQ could talk for a while (but all my ICQ contacts that I kept had moved to AIM or MSN by then anyway). As I recall, originally, the ICQ client polled the server via UDP to see if it had any messages, and th…
Woah, ICQ had peer-to-peer? I thought it was quite centralized! Was that before the OSCAR migration? I only remember Skype being "true" peer-to-peer, with your PC randomly becoming a presence/call relaying "supernode" if you had a publicly reachable IP and good connectivity. Different times!
Yeah, ICQ was peer to peer for online messaging as I recall in the say 97-99 timeframe. I think Yahoo was too. They'd fall back to server message passing, of course.
But this was just for messaging (and file transfer), not for presence/buddy list which was all server driven.
In that time frame, few had firewalls or NAT or two computers at the same location, so (server mediated) peer to peer just worked unless you were on a corporate network.