Comment by Telemakhos
7 hours ago
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.
7 hours ago
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.
Pidgin also supported XMPP: it was a multi-protocol client. It was just a client, not a messaging system of its own. They'd abstracted the send/receive from the actual messages and built a bunch of backends that could handle pretty much any messaging protocol at the time.
ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.