
An oral history of the AIM away message - wallflower
https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/an-oral-history-of-the-aim-away-message-by-the-people-who-were-there/
======
lanstin
They don't get into it, but the AIM host infrastructure was based on the
event-based non-blocking libraries written by Lippke. The host complex was a
distributed hash table (routed on relevant data, e.g. Screen name, ICQ
number), with the extra step that you can migrate the in-memory state from one
host to another while still taking incoming work. Quite a powerful
infrastructure to build highly-available services. Only oddity is that you
needed to have the clients (AIM clients and internal datacenter callers) have
the ability to detach from one end point and re-attach to another end point
when the bucket containing doing work for that client migrated to new
hardware.

In the layer you were writing code, it was routed by the thing you hashed on,
so it was sort of SDN like in its ability to separate the application state
from the physical hardware. Amazingly good server technology. AOL had all
kinds of cool tech - dynamically assigned (/24) subnets, IP Tunnels from the
client, giant compression/caching farms that essentially cached all the static
assets on the internet, etc. etc. In the 90s that is; those machines Eric was
deploying onto were less powerful than your smart phone.

~~~
djsumdog
The early days of Facebook chat where god awful, with tons of missed messages
and things not syncing within the web and 3rd party clients. AIM (and even
Yahoo and MSN) were over a decade ahead of that garbage before FB eventually
caught up with having a messaging system that didn't suck ass.

In fact most things Facebook did originally it did poorly: poor quality photo
storage (Flickr offered high quality or even original quality for a fee),
garbage messaging, etc. It eventually caught up after it got big, because
everyone was already using it .. and all the other platforms lost market share
or became niche.

~~~
popz41
I believe messages were originally built on SMTP, then it moved to XMPP, then
it all moved to MQTT

~~~
benbristow
Quite an interesting thread posted last New Years here of how Facebook scale
for demand at New Years Eve when everyone is sending Happy New Years messages
at midnight

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780741)

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sjdegraeve
If you're wondering what people (teen girls) used to put in their away
messages, I've been running a site since 2003 that has acted as a database of
these "witty profiles".

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030416074540/http://www.wittyp...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030416074540/http://www.wittyprofiles.com/)

~~~
w0m
Kudo's for WBM link; it's fun to see Then vs Now.

------
peterwwillis
The first successful software project I made was an AIM chat bot.

I wanted to receive messages from friends while I was offline (because,
remember, you had to dial into the internet and tie up a phone line...). I was
amazed by the utility of store-and-forward network architectures, but I was
surprised that SMTP was the only high level protocol that seemed to use it.
Why couldn't something send me my messages when I came back online? It seemed
so simple (I think ICQ even supported it)

So I found some Perl libraries that could talk the AIM protocol (later OSCAR)
and started hacking. I was able to beg my way into a free shell account on a
Linux box and used it to mock up a client with a chat interface. Say hello,
and it would give you the options: send a message to a friend, get a fortune,
play a game, etc. If you sent a message to a friend, it would wait until the
friend was online and relay the message. It also had pre-recorded responses
for how I imagined people would talk to it.

I don't know how, but word got out about the bot, and eventually I had dozens
of people playing games and getting fortunes, and occasionally using the
message-forwarder. It was amazing to me that people liked using this dinky
chat bot that I put together for fun, and it inspired me to get into open
source development. I think was 16 at the time.

~~~
asdfman123
This is random, but did anyone get interested in programming due to Furcadia?

I played it in late elementary school and you could write your own levels -- I
think they were called "dreams" \-- that people could visit with all kinds of
conditional logic.

You know how as a kid you'd sometimes daydream about your future? I daydreamed
that I would later become a computer programmer and be able to look back and
my messing around in Furcadia was my start. For some reason I thought being a
programmer was a fancy job that was somehow out of reach.

Now I'm a computer programmer... and yeah, tooling around with computers in
the 90s was my "start."

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alphis001
This is BS.

The away message was invented by AOL "proggers" which included, amongst other
features, the Away Message. This was long before AOL simply absorbed that
feature. If you remember Fate/FateX, Sublime, Paladin, Magenta, and the other
infinite number of tools many of them had this feature. AOL just copied it
because like most awesome things, it was invented by the users' creativity.

AOHell4LYFE.

-~[1337 tewlz]~-

~~~
petropolisful
>If you remember Fate/FateX, Sublime, Paladin, Magenta

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

~~~
patrioticaction
Punting was my first exposure to cyber warfare, miss those days

~~~
sizzle
I enjoyed reverse engineering AIM exploit programs, there was one called
subterfuge by sevens from esotericcode.com

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060701053020/http://www.esoter...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060701053020/http://www.esotericcode.com/)

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dandigangi
This was about 90% of the conversations my friends and I had:

Them: "hey whats up" Me: "nm you?" Them: "nm" Me: "cool"

EOL

~~~
JimiofEden
As described by my favorite animation ever:

    
    
      Adam: Hey STUD!
      Adam: LOL j/k
      Duncan: Hey.
      Adam: What's going on??
      Adam: ;)
      Duncan: Not much. brb.

~~~
logicchains
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjVugzSR7HA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjVugzSR7HA)
for the curious.

~~~
xxr
Unabridged version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB-
gYr49Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB-gYr49Y)

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empath75
Slack was probably the last straw that broke aim. We used aim internally at
aol for work related messaging up until slack came out and people started
using it one team at a time. It got to the point that so many teams were using
it that aol bought an enterprise license for it and that was basically it for
aim as a product.

~~~
rubicon33
Didn't AIM for consumers shut down long before slack came out?

~~~
Falling3
No, Slack was initially released in 2013. AIM was shut down at the end of
2017.

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ymerej
Speaking of ICQ, I remember when AOL bought out ICQ and had a huge engineering
success when they pulled the switch and all of sudden, ICQ users were
seamlessly on the AIM infrastructure. When you think of the sizes of those
networks it was really amazing.

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bluedino
This was a great read. I liked the part about the AIM team 'stealing' the
running man logo.

We talk about work-life balance, but these projects had to have been amazing
for people to dedicate chunks of their lives to them.

I wonder if we'll ever read stories about building slack and look back it so
fondly.

------
wDcBKgt66V8WDs
I grew up with AIM and remember, even before AIM, the AOL CDs stockpiled in my
house. They were quite handy as coasters and lids to wine glasses in the
summer when the fruit flies came out. My parents still have some lying around
for those purposes, not at all the classiest solutions but free and better
than the landfill? There isn't even a CD drive in that house anymore.

More on topic, AIM as something to grow up with was ehhh. I kind of wish it
didn't exist so I would have been more forced to push my parents to drive me
to friends houses instead of hogging the family computer. Today I feel like
the modern equivalents are probably Discord+Fortnite/Minecraft/whatever on
personal machines which from my armchair looks a lot better from a social
perspective.

~~~
daveslash
Before there were AOL CDs, there were AOL Floppy disks. There were gold to me.
I had no money to buy floppies and I had stuff that I wanted to, uh, save. I
think I still have an AOL Floppy in the original shrink-wrap somewhere.

~~~
heymijo
14.4 Kbps modem...sneak downstairs after bed, hold pillows over computer to
muffle the modem's screeching, set one (1!) picture to download over night,
set alarm to wake up before everyone else, find connection died and only
downloaded top third of the picture.

Rinse and repeat until I finally had something worth, uh, saving on a floppy
disk.

~~~
daveslash
A fun (troll) use that I had for an AOL CD... I borrowed a CD from a friend in
high school. It was their favorite CD, but we were friends so they lent it to
me. When it was time to return the CD to my friend...I took an AOL CD, ground
it into the dirt, held a lighter to one side, shattered it, and then scotch
taped it back together. When I "returned" my friend's favorite CD, I gave them
AOL CD shiny-side up. After a short (fewer than 5 second) freak-out, I
returned my friend's favorite CD in pristine condition. I was a bit of a jerk,
but they took it in good humor.

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djsumdog
Wasn't the original idea behind Twitter to keep a log of IM away messages?

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smegmasamurai
when my friends and i figured out how to send someone a link that would turn
on their away message (and profile i believe, cant remember) with whatever we
wanted to it to say chaos ensued.

~~~
kevinslashslash
I remember sending people a link to change their buddy icon

------
bluedino
AIM was one of those unique things, it was 'cool' even though it was created
by AOL.

AOL was the lamest online service, it was what your grandma used. No self-
respecting hacker or power user would use AOL. But everyone used AIM.

~~~
fourstar
You must be young. The AOL hacker scene was quite vibrant. Mass mailers, PR
room: server, server when server got banned, cerver. Plus the plethora of
exploits. Go to archive.org and lookup aol-files.com.

EDIT: lest I forget AIM pr: darkside

~~~
rconti
Conclusion does not follow. Many of us skipped AOL entirely. That's not to say
there weren't interesting things to do there if you chose to use it, or were
forced to use it by circumstance.

~~~
turdnagel
Of course it follows. The OP said "no self-respecting hacker" would use
AOL/AIM, which is a not only a "no true scotsman" fallacy but untrue. I, too
was introduced to the world of programming through AOL chatrooms, and there
were some really incredible hackers/programmers who hung out in them.

~~~
rconti
Fair, though I was referring to the "you must be young".

------
pradn
Most "oral" histories should be called "folk" histories.

~~~
reaperducer
There are cultures where passing information orally is so common that it's as
accurate as written information.

Writing things down made people less able to remember things. Just as Google
made us incapable of researching and remembering details.

------
rconti
> There is no feature that Facebook has today that AIM didn’t have at some
> point 20 years ago.

The article mentions the Newsfeed; I don't know how the AIM team thinks
distributed status messages (or whatever?) are analogous to the news feed, nor
the community sharing/commenting/photos/etc.

But one thing Facebook DID have, when it was curated, was links to EVERYTHING.
You could see who was taking the same class as you, even the same section. You
could see who lived in the same residence hall. You could search/sort/filter
on EVERYTHING. It was amazing.

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ellius
I really wish iPhones had away messages for iMessage and/or SMS. It can seem
like you're intentionally being a dick if you don't respond promptly, so it'd
be nice to just make it clear you've chosen to be not available instead of
this weird uncertain state that seems to be the default. Bonus points if you
could join and leave group chats seamlessly like AIM chat rooms.

~~~
reaperducer
I don't think this is quite what you're looking for, but it's possible to set
a custom auto-responding message when the phone is in do not disturb mode. I
use this when I'm driving.

~~~
ellius
Actually I didn't know that, thanks.

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samfisher83
AOL/Aim was really the original social network. You can have status message.
They wasted a great opportunity.

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pier25
a/s/l

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bertil
I’m seeing a 404. Anyone else?

~~~
dandigangi
Nope

