I got on ICQ in 97 or 98 to keep up with friends from a MUD and mine was 7 digits. I haven't logged into it in over a decade because when I went back to see if anyone from the old game was around none ever showed up online.
As someone who has most of her socialization on IRC now... Eww, mIRC is proprietary and for Windows. Maybe it's just me having learned about IRC only a couple years ago and thus not having a sentimental attachment, but why use it if you have open-source ones like Hexchat, Irssi or Weechat?
"Lemmy: Where men are men, and men are women, and women are men, and I think we've got a few women who were born women, and also there's a whole bunch of new genders as well, and no genders at all, and that's all cool with most of us."
It's a mouthful and might not read well on a t-shirt, but we can workshop it.
I knew my first long distance gf on ICQ. I remember also having that service in Miranda IM along Yahoo Chat, MSN, Google Chat (back when it was based on XMPP) and Jabber.
Messages from my current gf are announced with the classic ICQ "Uh-oh!".
Not sure about the owner, but I was able to sign in and see my profile a few days ago. It was an account from maybe ‘96 or ‘97, and I hadn’t even attempted to sign in in at least 15 years.
Out of nowhere, I logged in like a month ago. Everything was still there (at least, my friends list was). Hadn't logged in since the early 2000s. A few weeks later, I heard it was being shuttered. Weird.
Yes! Trillian was awesome! I used it fairly religiously from the early to mid 00s. Combined my ICQ, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, and AIM. I miss that beautiful, convenient piece of software.