What a great app! I remember for a little while you could interact directly with AOL IM. Had a superiority complex using icq while other poor dweebs were on AOL default IM app.
Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I'm not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.
Must have been thinking of that handle's Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.
... and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I'm going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.
The thing about that screenshot that has me curious is the shortcut to 7zip which, although it has been around for longer than I realised, no one really used until the 2nd half of the 00's
Which makes it kinda more interesting tbh—did someone at Ars set this up to take a screenshot of ICQ? Getting a windows 98 VM set up with all that other stuff just for an article image seems like a lot of effort for a journalist who probably needs to get a few articles written a week.
If it wasn't Ars, who was it and why did they set up a somewhat period-accurate windows 98 VM and then take a screenshot of ICQ out of everything?
Oh don't get me wrong, I get that someone might set up the VM, I just don't know why they'd do that plus then screenshot ICQ and put it somewhere online for this journalist to find
Maybe someone in the art department keeps a Windows 98 VM setup specifically for these tech obituaries for programs and services people thought were long dead. I don’t think I’ve used AIM/ICQ/MSN Messenger since around 2007/2008, and it was because it had become pretty dead.
But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it simultaneously laid the groundwork for direct messaging and social networking as we came to know it in the post-Facebook era.
In the wake of the Netscape IPO, which heralded a new era of tech-based money-making ventures, the four of them were looking for an idea to run with.
The application didn't have much marketing behind it, but it spread quickly by word of mouth—particularly in nascent online gaming communities around multi-user dungeons (MUDs), early deathmatches, and so on.
ICQ was eventually purchased by AOL, and it lost ground to more heavily financially backed services like AIM and MSN.
That company eventually morphed and changed its name to VK, and it has been keeping ICQ on life support as a sort of Russian Skype alternative since.
I signed up because I was playing the online game Meridian 59, and its community largely used ICQ for out-of-game communication.
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