461–470 of 776 posts
I know this doesn't add much value to the discussion, but I was really proud of my UIN when I was a teenager. And this may be my last chance to flaunt it, so here it is: 1779900 So back in the day, these were known as Universal Internet Numbers, or UINs. You have to admire the sheer audacity of using that name for the user identifiers of a service you're building. I believe they were renamed to "ICQ#" later.
Back in the day, messaging was pretty awesome. You could use an app like Pidgin and pretty much talk to anyone no matter what color their bubbles were. Today, I have to have one app for all the different ways to get ahold of someone. It's pretty annoying, but we did it to ourselves. Yay.
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Or just don't take your phone out? I always read these threads and think that the folks here probably have issues disconnecting and so they're longing for a world where social pressures forced disconnection. I still frequently don't check my socials until after work or after a long social activity. I'm upfront with my contacts about that too, and most of my friends are like me. I only monitor my phone constantly if I…
I am not complaining about myself, but how society behaves. Yes I can do it, but it doesn't mean the rest will follow me.
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I have to admit, the thought has crossed my mind that it would be kinda cool to build a messaging server with support for ICQ protocol, MSN's protocol, OSCAR (AIM), Yahoo's protocol, etc. Maybe throw in XMPP too. And in reading up on OSCAR[1] just now, I only just found out that ICQ did use OCSAR as well (at least according to Wikipedia). I never knew that. I had always thought OSCAR was only used by AIM. Live and le…
A team has reverse engineered MSN and launched their own MSN IM server: https://escargot.chat/
This 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
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Then something like trillian to glue them all together.
There was also Meebo, which allowed you to login to all of them via a web interface (which I believe none of the messengers had natively) without installing the respective clients!
I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM express.
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22861316 Tried to login a few years back to see if any of my old Quake buddies happened to still use it, but couldn't. Support said unless I had the recovery email still, which was at bigfoot.com which has been dead for decades, I was out of luck.
Interesting, I managed to open the other IDs I found here, but yours gives me a very broken web page: https://icq.im/22861316/en I wonder if you had some ASCII characters, or those old custom-font-and-special-characters texts we used to use?
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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.
Then something like trillian to glue them all together.
The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.
Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country.
But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autism spectrum, that was one of the best feelings I had at that time.
Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN. I see a direct line from there to the annoying easy-to-accept-while-hard-to-reject-but-always-there-anyway cookie pop-ups.
And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings. ICQ just had a great user experience as far as I am concerned and to this day I prefer it to existing alternatives from WhatsApp to Webex chat (don’t mention Teams please, I’m having a poetic moment). It was rather a feeling that perhaps other Brazilians will share: a longing, saudade, for the simpler (yes) but better and more poetic 90s, when ICQ connected you to a world that watched Brazil win the fourth World Cup, Ayrton Senna was inspiring generations to be healthier and their better selves and Mamonas Assassinas could only make us laugh, not cry…
So long, ICQ. You will always be part of why I love the internet.
PS: I realize the timing of those events doesn’t necessarily align. But sentimentally they do.