All I can say is: "Uh oh!" https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4
I knew a girl who could imitate perfectly that. Great party trick.
ICQ will stop working from June 26
351–360 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 started writing an essay about this topic. I am one of those nostalgics by the old internet. I thought it was the aesthetic (geocities, etc), but after giving it a lot of thought, that wasn't. It was that your life (all of us) was "offline by default". We lived offline and then we connect to the internet for a few minutes, hours, whatever. But you lived your life offline. We attended concerts, took photos, recorded…
> We attend a concert? We publish pictures and videos almost instantly
Switch to a data plan with less than 2GB of data per month and you'll be a lot more thoughtfull about how much you post instantly. You may still post it but you'll do it when you get home; just like the old days.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#353I think I still remember my ICQ #: 15868571 EDIT: How would I even log in to take a peek? It won't accept my US phone # and my (old, insecure) passwords that I likely used no longer work (and I can't seem to use that number as the login!)
My finnish phone number did not work either with web login, although I dont think I ever saved it anywhere back then. But succeeded to login with UID and password that I have luckily been keeping in safe (post-its first in the 90s, keepass nowadays)
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#354RIP ICQ.
Many fond memories.
I never looked into the protocols in the background, but it was for most of the time very solid and reliable in delivering offline messages, with correct timestamps and all the stuff you would expect as normal.
But Skype was gaining popularity very quickly, and a lot of communication at work got switched from direct person-to-person ICQ or Yahoo Messenger messages, to Skype group chats and calls. Which was really frustrating given how messages were barely functional on Skype basically forever. It would regularly happen that I was offline for e.g. 30 min, someone would send me a message during that time, I would come back online, and then randomly receive that message 2 days later.
In any case - a really solid product, service and one of the big formative parts of my youth and early internet days. Thanks to all the people that made it happen.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#355I remember coding im_kit on BeOS and chatting along over ICQ, AIM and others. Happy days!
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#356This 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…
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,…
Decades ago there was encryption that one of those clients (maybe pidgin) layered on top of AIM. It used 128-bit blowfish for the cipher, but the key was negotiated with 128-bit diffie hellman, which killed the security.
I started to implement the number field sieve to demonstrate this, but got lost in the weeds and moved on to other stuff.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#3571303789 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.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#358Sometime in 1997 ICQ banned underage users due to some legal issue they perceived. I changed my age on my account to see what would happen, and got banned, no way to recover.
I miss the little sounds it made, "hoot Hoot"
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#359This 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…
I just logged in for the first time in over 25 years a few weeks ago. I found https://web.icq.com/ which does not require an email address: only the ID and password. And back then I used a single password for everything. And it worked! All my old online friends from my childhood were there, my profile message, etc. While most were offline, a few showed up as online and I quickly messaged them! But my excitement died…
I tried messaging someone who seemed to be online and got a system reply telling me that my account had been compromised which is entirely possible as 20 years ago I used that same password elsewhere.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#3601303789 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.
> Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect? Yes. It was like giving out your telephone number.
And that's also why we remember it. It's from a time we used to remember phone numbers (smartphones weren't around, in many countries even normal cell phones weren't widespread yet, and even those had limited memory and usually no way to migrate to a new phone (the SIM could store entries too but had laughably low capacity, like 25 entries with max 9 letters for the contact name)).
So, committing them to memory was just a thing. And our brains get less plastic with age. I can remember my home phone number from 1982, but not my last cell number (before the current one) although I used it for 3 years, as recently as 2014. The insane amount of information streaming in front of our senses probably also triggered some unconscious attitude adjustment (not going to bother remembering any of it, if it's important I'll write it down).