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
3333801
Just managed to login. Had one person on my contact list and he is dead...
489151 here. I even got a job offer from ICQ back in the day. One of the perks they offered was a small ICQ number ending in zeros. I didn't take the job offer because I was in high school, though, and wasn't even looking for a job. It's unclear whether they knew that. I'd written some companion program and put it on the internet and they'd found it and were impressed. :)
Hah, cool. I had a similar experience with Xoom.com (the website hosting company). They sent me a job application because I had been volunteering in their forums for a while, assisting people with developing websites. I still remember going into my parents room to tell them I'm applying for a job and they had no idea what I was talking about. I submitted the application, and the Xoom staff had a good chuckle as they…
I switched to Xoom from Geocities because I could upload files via WS_FTP. For my fantasy wrestling web site haha!
489151 here. I even got a job offer from ICQ back in the day. One of the perks they offered was a small ICQ number ending in zeros. I didn't take the job offer because I was in high school, though, and wasn't even looking for a job. It's unclear whether they knew that. I'd written some companion program and put it on the internet and they'd found it and were impressed. :)
Mirabilis contacted you? I worked on some ICQ software in high school, and was the maintainer of large user base ICQ clone. I still own the domain: licq.org Never got a single job offer, guess they saw my code and went running away ;)
I will forever treasure my ICQ memories. 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 autis…
ICQ was nice but everyone moved on to Yahoo Messenger. That was the bomb. Truly unbelievable Yahoo didn't capitalize on that. Everyone used it.
I don't think everyone did. Maybe it's local to your circle of contacts. From what I remember yahoo barely made a dent here in Australia.
This is a thread to ask: are there any good/working tools to process the old databases from ICQ 99/2000 versions? Maybe even the Mac version? I have some old backups I'm sure have ICQ DBs on them and it would be cool to dump the contents.
Dang, props for holding onto that. I’ve only got some low res jpegs from that era.
Iirc the .dat file was largely readable if you opened in a text editor; have you tried?
You also had digital freedom and autonomy. You controlled how many ICQ accounts you had. Setting one up took a minute and cost nothing. You chose the client you used to connect with. Noobs used the official ICQ adware and you used some 1337 open source client on Linux that could handle both ICQ and Jabber. But you could talk to them on the same platform. Where are the alternative WhatsApp clients? Or iMessage? Or Tel…
Element is where it's at.
Yup. Matrix and Jabber are what’s left. Sadly, all of the US is on iMessage, locking us not only into proprietary chat, but proprietary hardware to run the proprietary chat. I don’t really like my iPhone, but I bridge iMessage to my Matrix server, and as soon as I switch to Android, my iMessage account turns into email address only and I’m locked out. I’ve honestly considered paying for a phone line to an iPhone that stays plugged in at home, to free me to use whatever other phone I want to. That’s how far we’ve fallen.