Comment by purerandomness
9 hours ago
Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.
9 hours ago
Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.
I never had ICQ because I was opposed to replacing open internet protocols with proprietary walled gardens governed by unaccountable private corporations imposing clickwrap contracts of adhesion on helpless users.
When ICQ was at its peak, users of any chat software were a rather thin layer of population. So "everybody" is more than exaggeration.
Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.
Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.
It was very popular, no argument about it, especially among then youngsters. But "everybody" blows it of proportion way too much.
>ICQ was not some elite hacker thing
Sure, exactly IRC was that hacker thing.
ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.
This is type mismatch + incorrect assumptions. In 2001 ICQ went over 100 mln registered UINs. Which is not the same as "active users", it's all registrations from the inception (minus 10000 reserved). Losing UINs was a very common thing. Password recovery required email, which wasn't obligatory during registration, even if entered wasn't verified, back then few people knew what "password manager" is, and finally emails weren't particularly stable identity before gmail. But even if we would, for the sake of argument, assume the number as active users count, regular internet users by that time were numbered at more than half a billion. So even with absolutely unrealistically high estimation, ICQ share would be less than 20% of then internet population. And more realistic is probably 10-15%.
No it wasn't and it's not even close.
Definitely a regional thing. Where I grew up it was MSN Messenger all the way.
MSN Messenger was a bit after ICQ's peak
AOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.
By the time Pidgin existed I switched to something else. Maybe Jabber (today called XMPP). I don't quite remember though.
AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.
Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.
AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.
Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.
do you mean Trillian, the software that offered a (very themable) frontend to AIM, ICQ, yahoo and (i think) at least 3 more chat services? the awesomeness of Trillian made it obvious how useless it is for so many different services to coexist while they all offer the same value. still true today
Funny, that's always the impression I had of ICQ back in the day...
Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?
Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?
> even into the broadband years
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?) At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!
AIM was not around when I was using ICQ. Like, it literally didn’t exist.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
ICQ was released only 6 months before AIM, not that big of a difference. :D
Oh. Misunderstanding. I thought I was replying to a comment about IRC.