Comment by apelapan
4 hours ago
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.
ICQ and AIM. Later, whatever the first Google one was. When it looked like ICQ or AIM.
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.