The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.
Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country.
But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autism spectrum, that was one of the best feelings I had at that time.
Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN. I see a direct line from there to the annoying easy-to-accept-while-hard-to-reject-but-always-there-anyway cookie pop-ups.
And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings. ICQ just had a great user experience as far as I am concerned and to this day I prefer it to existing alternatives from WhatsApp to Webex chat (don’t mention Teams please, I’m having a poetic moment). It was rather a feeling that perhaps other Brazilians will share: a longing, saudade, for the simpler (yes) but better and more poetic 90s, when ICQ connected you to a world that watched Brazil win the fourth World Cup, Ayrton Senna was inspiring generations to be healthier and their better selves and Mamonas Assassinas could only make us laugh, not cry…
So long, ICQ. You will always be part of why I love the internet.
PS: I realize the timing of those events doesn’t necessarily align. But sentimentally they do.
ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet, or internet of the people if you prefer the term.
After companies started dominating the internet, it was never be the same. We thought that any company would play by our rules, but they poisoned us with their research, gamification, single way information flow, and walled gardens.
> ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet
It was proprietary client software released in 1996 and bought by AOL two years later.
It relies on a service operated by a single party, which is now sunsetting it.
According to the Wikipedia article, when ICQ was under AOL's stewardship, "AOL pursued an aggressive policy regarding alternative ("unauthorized") ICQ clients."
The article details all the tactics that AOL implemented in the service to break unofficial clients.
I don't see where the word "democratic" connects with ICQ.
That is correct but it was still more open than what we have now with the current services.
3rd party clients and multi-protocol messengers we don't have at all anymore.
Interesting, need to check but so far the modern methods of multi protocol messaging was mostly just aggregating the web UIs of the various services in a single application (read: like a web browser)
Pidgin, Miranda, Adium are the things I was referring to - would be cool if I could use them for whatsapp, signal, gmail chat/hangouts but I don‘ think thats possible. Happy to get corrected here.
You missed the point. The point wasn't the nature of the tool itself. Anyone could join, and one could chat with anyone. It was used "by the people" and not curated by corps.
ICQ was not "curated" by a corporation; it was produced and operated by one from scratch.
The present-day, mainstream, proprietary chat systems are open to anyone to join and chat with anyone.
Most of whatever restrictions they have are necessitated by spam. Allowing new members to immediately post unlimited amounts of material into any chat room or any other member's inbox is a bad idea, even in an open-source, federated chat system.
With the built-in option to “hijack account”, when sending a password longer than 8 characters would log you in, but official clients capped you at 8 characters.
I had to recompile some cmd line one from the linux sources to work from my home directory on my universities unix system ~2000. Back before everyone in college had laptops.
I’ve spent the last couple of days finding random GitHub and Gitlab projects that use a certain library/project to use as “documentation” in lieu of joining the discord.
Guess what? Most of them are abandoned and have similar bugs that are entirely down to some shit being completely undocumented :)
> At least open source projects should use open source communication tools
I strongly agree.
I think there are a few steps the community could take.
• Promote awareness of this, put it in licence agreements or contributor guidelines.
• Document how to find and how to use FOSS comms tools.
• Pidgin is the best we have for now. It needs an update, so the package includes as many protocol connectors as possible as standard, together with docs how to enable and use them. Getting away from crappy web apps embedded in Electron is pretty important, especially for bringing xBSD and so on on board.
• A corresponding update for Adium would be good, too.
A few years ago I worked for a major Linux vendor and I had Pidgin talking to IRC, Rocket.chat, Slack, Telegram, Skype, Google $CHAT_NAME_OF_THE_MONTH, and all my other services... but it took considerable manual effort.
The result was working multiprotocol chat in about 10% of the RAM usage of the Franz Electron client.
On Adium? Really? Great to hear that. I was extremely fond of Adium, a decade ago.
On Pidgin? Cool. I am surprised but I managed to get Pidgin working on macOS via Brew yesterday, which automatically installed a recent version of WINE, to my considerable surprise.
It wouldn't connect to anything and I couldn't find where, in one OS's emulated filesystem on top of my real OS's rather complex filesystem, I could put plugins, but hey, it started and ran and that's quite impressive.
Given that Gtk apps such as Geany manage to run on macOS, I thought a native Unix port of Pidgin would be an easier effort than the Windows one, but hey.
Yes, "The other one". IRC and ICQ was equal in its use in my circles and both were indispensable for what they did. Plus, we all used alternative clients too.
Well done acknowledging it though. That converted a bit of pointless internet anger into a great bit of personal responsibility. Thanks fellow internet user for doing your part today to make the net a better place.
As others have pointed out, our fond memories of the Old Internet being "democratic" may be a little off.
But. I think it's fair to say it felt more free, it had a high barrier of technical entry, which filtered out most of the public, and there was no craven race to monetize and enshitify absolutely every single of our interactions.
Mostly because corporations were in the process of figuring out how to do all that with this new Internet thing.
First thought: I had assumed ICQ was long dead. It seemed impossible anything from that era could still be running. IRC is of course, through the grace of an ecosystem, but it is a tiny fraction of what it was.
Second thought: how do people randomly connect to talk now? Comments sections mostly? I have long ago stopped seeking new connections of any variety.
I’m pretty sure IRC has continued to grow in obscurity, much like Gopher, which, last I checked, was also at an all-time peak and growing steadily but slowly.
I don't think IRC is one of those technologies whose usage count in absolute terms is at an all-time high today. It wasn't exactly mainstream in the early 2000s, but it still had lots of users.
Thanks, that’s interesting info. I think you might be underestmating this part though:
“Here you see the 100 largest and most popular IRC networks that take part in netsplit.de's comparison, but please consider that there are still some big IRC networks that are out of competition"
Nice. I just remembered my 8 digit login and password and indeed, my wife also had an account back somewhere in 2005-2008. (I brought here there but didn't meet her there though)
ICQ was bought by... uhh Russians? Israelis? Something like that... and was changed several times what it actually is; when I tried it recently, it was just a WhatsApp clone; they even removed all the old ICQ number accounts.
I'm actually kinda bummed to hear that. I logged in sometime in the past few years and was pleasantly surprised to see my number from the 90s still worked. Moot point now if the whole thing is being shut down anyways, I guess.
Just getting online used to place you in a small enough pool that making connections was easy -- the fact that you were online in the first place gave you something in common.
Any single online platform has far too many users (and spammers, bots, trolls, grifters, etc.) to make it a good place to meet friends.
This new (and to be euthanised) ICQ isn't the one with the numeric username. Out of curiosity I did (re-)register a few years ago, IIRC it used the user's phone number as the username.
I hate it as well, mostly for the fact that people don't understand how Matrix is decentralized. They think "join matrix.org and create a space" as the same as "creating their own server".
there is an entire generation conditioned to call any group chat or instance a “server” and the pedant in me absolutely wants to scream every time I hear it
I believe the origin, however, was to help it clearly and directly compete with teamspeak or mumble at the time it launched. You would actually have to invest in some sort of hosted server for your group, so the name made sense as a way to help people visualize how discord worked. It’s definitely a relic at this point though.
The comment you replied to is more accurate, as WhatsApp is huge in multiple continents not just in Europe (just not as big in North America as you both point out). For example it's big in South America (and I think Central America too?)
Yes - I think if you pick a country at random it's more likely to have WhatsApp high on the list of communication tools than not, albeit with some of the biggest countries like China also joining the US in being exceptions).
It’s also why, briefly, (2008-2010 ish I believe) blackberry phones were the ones kids wanted because they could use blackberry messaging for free without using up their sms credits.
ICQ. Geocities (and even some of its clones). I even have fond memories of early yahoo chat such as it was.
The open Internet and the quirky services that made it up was a miraculous, wonderful thing back then. It’s heartbreaking to think of what it’s become since.
I sometimes wonder if there’s a way back to an Internet that resembles the one we had, but all people seem to care about now are celebrities on InstaTikTokTube.
In terms of what you said about ICQ and the sounds (totally agree btw), I used DarkSky for years before it got axed and I miss its rain warning sound horribly.
> when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN
MSN wasn't a worse alternative to ICQ, MSN was faster and came with Windows, making it both easier to keep running at the background on the weak hardware of the time (i remember launching ICQ and waiting waiting waiting at the splash screen with the rotating petal colors and then the main UI was a mess of buttons, icons and all sorts of bloat) and it was just easier to get into.
ICQ did release ICQ Lite which was lighter but by then that was too late - and even that couldn't combat MSN coming bundled with Windows, meaning that people who didn't have any IM suddenly now had one.
Pidgin was pretty awesome, though its underlying library was so riddled with vulnerabilities…
I greatly enjoyed how with XMPP’s in-band registration you could do things like give each contact a unique XMPP address, only to be used with them. You could have unlimited (well, I never hit a limit) accounts, across a load of servers, proxies per account, unique OTR keys per account, etc.
I don’t think the UI has really been surpassed either, tbh. I really wish someone would do a modern rewrite of Pidgin in some memory safe language.
That said, the vulnerabilities in "libpurple" were way over hyped by someone who rightfully got kicked out of the security community. Most of those vulnerabilities were in fact in protocol implementations that are plug-ins to libpurple and not libpurple itself. I know it's a technicality, but hearing this blatant lie get repeated for over a decade is exhausting.
> If you want to chat with people, you have to go where they are, and ICQ and AOL have the most people by far. Chances are, your friends are using one of those services, not one of the smaller ones like MSN Instant Messenger. With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong.
Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.
This reminded me of my Macintosh System 7 days. My CPU was not fast enough to decode MP3s so I convert them to WAVs but my 80MB HDD only had space for about two WAVs at any given time.
after ICQ, from what I remember AOL Messenger was the dominant force in the US, MSN was very popular in many countries, but across Asia, Middle East, and many Eastern European countries, Yahoo Messenger was the de facto standard.
Not dissimilar to the situation we have today with WhatsApp and WeChat and iMessage. Except back then you could use pidgin or trillian as multi protocol clients which solved the issue. Somehow, we have regressed so much in this area in the last 20 years.
The reason no one needs a multiprotocol client now is we all have instant, intuitive multiprotocol devices in our pocket at all times. That's what's changed in the last 20 years.
It was MSN messenger that came preinstalled with any new pc that slowly killed it, because a lot of people got their first computer in that period and thus only knew the Microsoft one. ICQ users slowly started to have a secondary MSN Messenger account (the days of Trillian) but that was it, once people have 2 messengers apps AND most of their friends are on the new one, they just slowly abandonned the one with less contacts.
I personnally didn't even knew there was a Yahoo issued Messenger until this comment.
This resonates a lot. When MSN become the norm was a big hit, then Windows Live and many people scattered around, left was Facebook but now only with IRL friends. Most alternatives since ICQ have been worse.
> Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN.
It wasn't so much the platform that set ICQ apart, it was the time in which it was born into. In the late 90s and early 00s, the internet was still an unchartered 'No Man's Land'. Internet access was difficult and scarce, and people approached it with curiosity and savor. Now the internet is taken for granted, and anonymously connecting to strangers so unremarkable, that it is seen as an excess that can be squandered in mindless and fleeting argument and opposition.
If there was an inflection point, I'd say it was around the nascent rise of Facebook. Connecting to familiars became the default, and also enough, that connecting to strangers didn't hold as much allure as competing to make your life look more appealing within your peer group.
It's just a scale thing. Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile. With mobile the internet became huge, absolutely massive, and the idea of a shared culture on the internet basically broke down. I'm pretty sure the average Discord server is bigger than the top 5 ICQ chatrooms combined. The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person (or someone who was on their way to becoming a Western upper-middle class college-educated person) as that was the only person who had the money, time, and education to afford the peripherals (home PCs, modems, telecoms costs, internet plans.)
Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. It was purely chat with the ability to discover other users around the world. It was one to one, not many to many, and there was no server bubble to restrict to a particular special interest.
> The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person
Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end. A lot of the people I talked to on ICQ were from ‘poorer’ countries. Chat wasn’t really demanding on bandwidth
> Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile.
The first smart phones were definitely more expensive than the cheapest PCs, but when they did get affordable in the global south around the early-mid 2010s, ICQ was long dead
> It's just a scale thing.
More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.
‘Social media’ was also a change in mode from relating to strangers to connecting to people we already know. But I don’t ascribe causation to Facebook specifically, it was just with enough time and enough scale (as you mention) that ‘social media’ was inevitable. Prior to Facebook I’d used services like MySpace, Bebo, and Quickdot, that have all since faded from view. We were searching for what Facebook came to be – a low effort way to share our experience with people we already know
> Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms.
My wires crossed a bit with AIM chat which I used around the same time. I only got on IRC later because I was too young to be interested in the things folks talked about on IRC at that age.
> Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end.
Basically someone with the ability to pay for Internet and pay for the phone time. Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable) prices differed but it was definitely not something people in the hood or from Asian countries outside Japan and Taiwan could justify spending money on.
> More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.
100%. I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph when the ability to contact anyone "anywhere" in the wealthy world became a lot easier and professional communications stopped being optimistic and instead expected.
> Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable)
Facebook era was late 00s, and didn't hit full stride globally until early 10s. By this point internet access was available to 1 in 4 people. Scale—in meaningful distinction to 'the old web'—had well and truly already arrived. The average Joe and Jane were using the internet.
> I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph
As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "The medium is the message". He also coined the term 'information overload' in the 60s when talking about the uptake of radio and television. Ever since the printing press, regular people have been gaining access to information at increasing volume, and not only those of means. However, the particular medium of the internet changed the means of accessing, generating and interacting with information and communicating other people. What McLuhan was pointing out by "The medium is the message" is that every medium has its own flavor, and it's own particular impact on society.
And for the internet it hasn't just been one impact: the rise of email and mailing lists, chat applications, internet-wide keyword search, social media, smartphones and apps, dating apps, AirBnB, Uber.. the fabric of social order is being disrupted again and again by the internet in a manner exceptional to other media. Sometimes it's even hard to see what changes have taken place. To take one example, the rise of dating apps has had a real impact on the profits and kinds of late night venues.
So, to bring back to my earlier point, social media had an impact that changed how we communicate. It was certainly very visible to me at the time. I think in particular with ICQ, it provided a means for strangers to meet and fostered connections outside of our respective bubbles, and for that I remember it fondly, and also worry a bit more about our world as it becomes more fragmented and isolated along social borders.
About your last paragraph: The key to me about Facebook, and eventually, Instagram, the visual is simply more powerful to humans than written words. This is why people started chasing fame with good looks as soon as the Internet "went visual".
I had a thought last week: When I was in high school (very early Internet years), older people told me the "popular" people will fade away when you go to university. For most part, in my experience, this was true. I realised last week that visual social media allows "high school popular people" (conventionally attractive, for the most part) to stay that way forever. When you look at most social media influencers, there isn't very much special about them, except them seem like the type of person who was popular in high school. For most normies, that is enough to give them more attention than someone else.
Well I'd say that Instagram was yet another inflection point, where relationships with strangers returned in parasocial many-to-one form, in place of the one-on-one intimacy afforded by ICQ.
At the time of ICQ, chat programs were the sole means of discovering and connecting to people, and allowed people to connect to strangers based on location. I made real life friends, who I met in person on ICQ. I suppose this kind of connection might still happening on game servers and Discord servers, but certainly, it isn't the dominant mode.
As for Facebook being 'visual': Facebook in it's earlier incarnations was just status updates, and mobile phone cameras were still pretty clunky (or non-existant). Instagram took off because it's filters turned otherwise ugly low-fidelity photos into something appealing.
>And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings.
The longing for Ostalgie was based on things being easier and basic needs met more easily than in the cut throat "free market" environment that followed
I have no idea what you're talking about. Everybody in Germany used ICQ. MSN and ICQ were concurrently popular in different regions. Everybody I knew from the US or other English-speaking parts of the world used MSN. There was no mass move from ICQ to MSN that lead to ICQ's demise, they basically both died at the same time when Facebook came out to the general public.
That’s what happened in my network in canada. It was ICQ first, then MSN became popular while Hotmail was becoming popular and people moved away from icq to msn. Once the switch happened, Icq disappeared very quickly.
I don’t remember that but I do remember a lot about the way messaging worked on it to be kind of clunky by modern messaging standards. At least early on I don’t think you saw messages you received in context of the conversation? That’s a distinct memory I have.
This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address).
But I had a low five digit user number, and built a lot of relationships on ICQ (some of which continue today!). It was my main method of electronic communication in college. I had romantic relationships live and die on ICQ.
One highlight was being able to connect to it from my phone for the first time; first on my first smartphone (Symbian), then from my "non-smart" Sony Ericsson that succeeded it, via some Java Jabber client and a Jabber-to-ICQ bridge! (Unfortunately nobody else that I knew had it on their phones, so I could only reach people in front of their PCs at home.)
On the other hand, it is and always has been unencrypted (not counting the OTR OTT encryption layer I've been using on it with the few friends that were also on Pidgin or Adium :), didn't support offline messages or even being logged in on more than one client, and was entirely proprietary (not sure if it was part of the "chat wars" [1] too).
Ultimately, the only constant in life is change. Instant messaging is alive and well on other platforms and networks today, let's remember ICQ fondly and be happy that we have so many good alternatives :)
Being reachable only from a PC at home… man. Now that I miss. The whole lifestyle of having a clear distinction between being at the computer and not. Status messages for a time when “away” was a state of being you ever were. Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you. Simpler times for sure.
I started writing an essay about this topic. I am one of those nostalgics by the old internet. I thought it was the aesthetic (geocities, etc), but after giving it a lot of thought, that wasn't. It was that your life (all of us) was "offline by default".
We lived offline and then we connect to the internet for a few minutes, hours, whatever. But you lived your life offline. We attended concerts, took photos, recorded videos, and then we took our time to share them online (maybe that same night, maybe the next days). You went online to discuss something that happened in real life.
Now it's the reverse. We live "online by default". Everything happens online, all we do is first online or at least at the same time. We attend a concert? We publish pictures and videos almost instantly (some people even do a live stream from the concert!). Something happens in politics? People discuss it as it happens on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Going to the computer to connect to surf the web may sound silly, but that was the difference. Internet was inside a device you had to use. Now internet is happening around you all the time (and if you miss it for a few days, ouch!)
The Internet being an opt-in thing that you'd consciously connect to at a set our of the day, not something that would reach out to you and notify you about all kinds of things at random times, was definitely a different feeling.
Back then, it felt like a parallel world; now it's more like an overlay on this one.
I guess AI is the next thing that's still opt-in now, will be opt-out tomorrow and then no-escape. It would be interesting to read a nostalgic thread from 2070...
That's life isn't it? Mailing addresses, electricity, car-based transportation in the US, technologies and cultural institutions change and create worlds dependent on them to function. There was probably a time when the very idea that you stayed up after the sun set was seen as a silly modern affliction and indeed for most of human prehistory humans did not have access to artificial lighting. Now there are people, like me, who consider themselves as night owls.
This captures it quite well. I remember due to having dial up until around 2008, I’d compose a forum post “offline” on the computer, save it as a text file on a flash drive (previously a floppy!), and get around to posting it when I was able to get online.
Same for emails, etc. communication felt a lot more “thought out” in a sense - you would have limited time to send or receive information.
This is one of those things where I just don't understand what world people are living in, but it's always written in this bizarre passive voice where someone is just "the victim" of installing the Facebook app on their phone.
What is your experience of your phone and why are you so passive about it? You're getting unwanted notifications but, then, what, don't uninstall the app? Don't mute the app? Don't click "sign out"?
Facebook and its ilk are barred from issuing notifications on my devices. There’s so little real ‘friend’ interaction these days I don’t miss anything and they abused notifications so thoroughly by literally spamming me random group stuff that I’ve just disabled notifications as a way of counteracting the lack of granularity. Must be five years now.
You also had digital freedom and autonomy. You controlled how many ICQ accounts you had. Setting one up took a minute and cost nothing.
You chose the client you used to connect with. Noobs used the official ICQ adware and you used some 1337 open source client on Linux that could handle both ICQ and Jabber. But you could talk to them on the same platform.
Where are the alternative WhatsApp clients? Or iMessage? Or Telegram? You can't talk to anyone anymore unless you submit to one of a few megacorps and run their software.
It was a good era where when ICQ added too many ads and features to the 99a client, I was able to switch to an alternatives like Miranda IM and they didn't make any attempts to block the alternate clients.
The app (at least when I used it decades ago) didn’t recommend accounts to follow or insert junk in your list. That’s the key reason I resent all social media I use today.
Yup. Matrix and Jabber are what’s left. Sadly, all of the US is on iMessage, locking us not only into proprietary chat, but proprietary hardware to run the proprietary chat. I don’t really like my iPhone, but I bridge iMessage to my Matrix server, and as soon as I switch to Android, my iMessage account turns into email address only and I’m locked out. I’ve honestly considered paying for a phone line to an iPhone that stays plugged in at home, to free me to use whatever other phone I want to. That’s how far we’ve fallen.
> We attend a concert? We publish pictures and videos almost instantly
Switch to a data plan with less than 2GB of data per month and you'll be a lot more thoughtfull about how much you post instantly. You may still post it but you'll do it when you get home; just like the old days.
I was on a 2GB data plan for most of this past decade, despite being terminally online, it never really got in the way. Would still share pictures immediately, they aren't that big (and most services compress video down to too horrible quality for it to be worth sharing). Still never managed to hit 2GB in a month.
The vast majority of my data usage now, on unlimited, comes from watching YouTube.
I've been pondering library box and pirate box kind of setups as well as mesh networks. I've never used any of that but the idea of having a separate network bound to a location seems rather interesting (be it in a kind of pokemon go kind of way)
You get a new flavor of privacy, no moaning about copyright, no nonsensical political correctness, much less need for security, people you can do things with irl and possibly very high bandwidth use or cpu intensive applications. It might even have limited time service like say outside office hours.
We use to have a popular forum around here ran by a pub. It became to much work to maintain and the owner wasn't interested enough. It was suppose to be for regular visitors.
If it was only accessible locally and on its own wifi network you set it up once and it would work just fine. Not having access to the darts competition from home is a feature not a drawback.
you reminded me that we used to pay for Internet access by the hour. You'd pay $X for one hour of Internet use, so you'd go online, do a thing and then disconnect to save money. local vs remote for email was such a different time. you'd have a fat client on your laptop, and you'd do a bunch of writing offline, before connecting, having the program sync, and then disconnect.
I still feel bad I left my parents' computer online all night to download a .wav (?) audio file of Mario jumping from Nintendo.com. Back then, the closest most kids got to Nintendo was via video game magazines. So going to Nintendo.com for the first time and downloading an audio file was a special moment. The download was taking hours and I have no idea how much it cost my parents. I just remember being so disappointed the next day when it turned out to only be a 1 second audio file. THAT WAS IT?!?! I WAITED ALL THAT TIME FOR THAT? :)
Wait, it didn't take an entire night to download a 1 sec wav (assuming the worst) file, did it?
1 sec of wav would be 176.4 kB (assuming 44.1 kHz, 16 bits, stereo), or 176.4 * 1024 * 8 bits. That divided by 28800 bits/s (assuming a 28k modem) gives 50.1 seconds.
A 96 kHz 32 bit stereo wav would be 768 kB, 4-5 times that so still less than 5 minutes.
This was a very long time ago, so I don't remember all details. But yes the download took hours. This was basically the first website I visited when I got internet access (and I would assume most kids did as well). So this predates 28.8 modems. I believe I had a 14.4 modem, was out in the country, and websites were not stable. This is somewhat of a core memory for me, so I do remember some details clearly.
Simply going to Nintendo.com took a very long time. Lots of us regular users started coming online for the first time and likely overloaded their servers. Navigating to the section of the website where it listed audio files to download was a whole endeavor of itself. It took multiple attempts to download that dang jumping sound. I would leave it running during the day and when I came back later, the download would have randomly timed out. And I think at least once my parents picked up one of phones in the house and messed it up. I believe as a kid I quickly learned that the web was faster at night time when less people were online. So after several failed attempts, I started it at night time and woke up to it completed. Not sure if you were online at that time, but I don't think you can simply reduce this to math equation.
There's no way a 14.4 modem would have taken a whole night to download a wav sound effect. Not even a 2400 modem would take remotely that long. You were doing something wrong.
I'm happy to believe the internet was slow and unreliable back them especially from the countryside (actually, I know it for a fact), but assuming a 7 hour night and a 1 second wav file (176.4 * 1000 * 8 = 1411200 bits, I made a mistake in my last comment) would mean 56 bits per second, that's 7 bytes/sec, that would be unusable to browse the web, even by the standards of this past. That's also far from what a 14.4 kbit/s modem is supposed to achieve, even considering that 14.4 kbit/s is a theoretical max and you'd be typically way below this speed in actual use. Hence our surprise.
At this speed, it would have taken you several minutes (and since the internet was unreliable, probably several attempts) to even load nintendo.com and then the download page. The simplest page I know in the wild, perdu.com, is 203 bytes, 909 bytes with the HTTP headers, that would take more than 2 minutes to load at that speed. nintendo.com was likely more complex than that. Given this, you'd have to have some very strong will and patience to go ahead and download a sound for fun as a child (though I can picture this).
I can only assume it didn't take the full night (you woke up on a finished download, it most likely did finish (way) before you were done sleeping), and that there's more to the story that the elements we have. What's still strange to me is that if it took say half an hour, with such a strong determination, would you have gone to sleep instead of excitedly waiting for the download to finish?
I'm not saying your memory is wrong or that you are lying or something like this, I'm sure this recollection is genuine and that it is a strong and fond memory, and I understand that it was long ago so difficult to remember the details, just that we are missing some critical piece to make something complete of your story for ourselves.
And sure, not everything can be reduced to math, but that's our best tool for estimating / evaluating stuff as distant observers.
I don't think I ever stated the download took all night. I said I left the computer connected to the Internet overnight, and it cost $$$ when you pay per hour.
During the day, yes it was taking hours. That does not mean it was downloading at some consistent rate for hours. I would start the download, then it would slow, then stall, and I would leave it and come back later to see it timed out. Rinse and repeat until I tried at night time. For some reason you all are trying to explain why this is impossible using math without considering any other factors (downloads can timeout, IE didn't resume downloads, picking up the phone would disconnect the connection, etc).
Did you all never download those 15-30 part warez versions on Photoshop, 3DS Max, etc. back in the day? I'm talking later, e.g. 28.8 modem days. It would take me several days, and in some cases a week, to download all of those parts. Sure, they were much larger. But the download would stop, timeout, pause for long periods. It wasn't simply a math equation: File size, modem capability = x minutes. I did not work on the infra side of Nintendo.com or any warez site as a pre-teen so I can't comment further on their scalability.
Public internet access did coincide with appearance of 14.4kbit/s modems here (Serbia) yet 9600 "baud" was actually more common, but you still rarely got that speed out of them.
Still, I don't ever remember needing hours to download a tiny wav file (though I mostly looked for MIDI music as that was long songs in a few kb).
You may be confusing things. By the time nintendo.com had a website, they were aready oferring small trailers in .mov (cuts from the stuff they would ship in vhs). A wav would have been very quick to download; a couple second QuickTime file -- not so much.
Or just don't take your phone out? I always read these threads and think that the folks here probably have issues disconnecting and so they're longing for a world where social pressures forced disconnection. I still frequently don't check my socials until after work or after a long social activity. I'm upfront with my contacts about that too, and most of my friends are like me. I only monitor my phone constantly if I'm awaiting an important call or email, but then I usually have something big going on in my life at the time.
I use my phone mostly as a PDA. Quick searches, reading Hacker News and RSS, Chatting (very infrequently), calls, and utilities. No socials apps, no games. And I have an ereader and a digital audio player for books and music.
I have plenty of social apps but they're pretty much on perma-mute except for folks like my partner or my parents who have "priority access" to my attention. During work hours work gets access, but they go on mute after hours + 2 (since I generally work a bit late.) I have a work pager setup on my phone if someone really needs me for work. Works out fine for me FWIW. I'll shitpost when I have time/brain space but leave them alone for days or even weeks if I'm occupied enough.
Does it matter? Was society behaving like you in other ways back then? I'm younger than the set here but not young certainly, and I distinctly remember how lonely it was to be a nerd in the '90s. I've assumed through most of my life that the most you can do is control how you and your circle behave. My circle varies on the introversion/extroversion scale where I'm in the middle and roughly get back to comms within a day, my more introverted friends may take multiple days, and have extroverted friends who get back within hours or even minutes. My partner is on the extroverted side and is constantly monitoring her comms but before the smartphone she had a rich rolodex of contacts who she was constantly calling.
Why do people have to follow you? I also experienced the "offline first" life and while I miss the wilder, more unsanitized nature of the internet from back then, I much prefer being able to always be connected.
> Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you.
Reminds me of personal experience of course but also the "Less Than Three" video [0], which in turn reminds me of the GUNSHIP Art3mis & Parzival music video [1]. I'll probably never watch the Ready Player One movie again, but I'll likely watch the GUNSHIP video another 100x.
I remember around 2007 or so a mobile provider here offered these “feature phones”, I think made by Huawei, that had zero rated MSN, Skype, and a couple of other services.
Went from “only available when at the PC” to “always online” overnight.
Got even funnier when someone worked out you could abuse the phone as a rather slow, but free, internet connection due to how poorly implemented the zero rating was done on those services :)
ICQ did support offline messages, from the beginning afaik, too. I had a 6-digit uin (485358 or something similar), until it got banned for running a bot (whoops).
To the sibling reply, I think AIM and ICQ did have interop on messages at some point, it was much later than when ICQ moved protocols to OSCAR and TOK though.
I can't remember, but I don't think MSN had offline messages. And I don't think ICQ lost offline messaging in the OSCAR transition, IIRC, ICQ moved to OSCAR with offline messages, then AIM got them, then AIM and ICQ could talk for a while (but all my ICQ contacts that I kept had moved to AIM or MSN by then anyway).
As I recall, originally, the ICQ client polled the server via UDP to see if it had any messages, and then you would do peer to peer for online messaging. But when you logged in, you'd get a cascade of the offline messages (uh, uh, uh, uh-oh)
Woah, ICQ had peer-to-peer? I thought it was quite centralized! Was that before the OSCAR migration?
I only remember Skype being "true" peer-to-peer, with your PC randomly becoming a presence/call relaying "supernode" if you had a publicly reachable IP and good connectivity. Different times!
Yeah, ICQ was peer to peer for online messaging as I recall in the say 97-99 timeframe. I think Yahoo was too. They'd fall back to server message passing, of course.
But this was just for messaging (and file transfer), not for presence/buddy list which was all server driven.
In that time frame, few had firewalls or NAT or two computers at the same location, so (server mediated) peer to peer just worked unless you were on a corporate network.
There were even some tools that showed you the IP, the "real status" and etc. of your contacts. The 9 year old me have felt like the greatest hacker of all time when using those tools :)
Circa 2000 or so, when AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ were all flourishing, Yahoo had already added offline messages. ICQ, I think also had them, though it was probably configurable, I recall the client having a half dozen screens of options. At that moment, neither MSN nor AIM had it yet. AIM eventually did add it, though I don't recall if it was added to AIM after ICQ de-merged from the AIM backend.
There was also Meebo, which allowed you to login to all of them via a web interface (which I believe none of the messengers had natively) without installing the respective clients!
Meebo was sick. I remember they never made any money though as an IM webapp, and eventually fully pivoted to some kind of on-page ad toolbar that site owners would add to their sites...for some reason.
It was MSN. I remember when MSN arrived late to the game, and managed to get users anyway, despite not having such an obvious feature, that the incumbent had.
Your phone experience reminds me of how, at about age 18, I coveted a Sidekick so much. I knew that it had AIM built-in. Since SMS was too expensive for me to consider a replacement for instant messaging, this seemed to me like the holy grail of teen socializing. To be able to use AIM anytime, anywhere...I could only imagine how cool it would be, especially if all my friends had it too.
I finally got something exactly like that in 2008 (both with mobile AIM clients, and as SMS and iMessage steadily overtook AIM for the purposes we used IM for), but it strikes me as poignant that as an adult, it wasn't really as meaningful to me as it would have been as a teen.
I guess what I'm saying is actually, I kind of get why the gen-z kids became so terminally online. I would have availed myself of the ability to socialize, privately, nonstop day and night!
The "proper" way of using ICQ from your phone was Jimm, an unofficial Java client. I was the cool kid with a patched Siemens phone, which could run native apps, so I used NatICQ.elf instead.
Haha, what Siemens phone could you patch to run native apps on? I must have switched to Nokia/Symbian before that became a thing. (That could run both native S60 and J2ME apps – basically infinite apps and games!)
Decades ago there was encryption that one of those clients (maybe pidgin) layered on top of AIM. It used 128-bit blowfish for the cipher, but the key was negotiated with 128-bit diffie hellman, which killed the security.
I started to implement the number field sieve to demonstrate this, but got lost in the weeds and moved on to other stuff.
>(not sure if it was part of the "chat wars" [1] too).
Kind of in that they were a good enough competitor that AOL bought them and AOL definitely continued to fight.
I don't think they ever publicly integrated them but they did merge the back ends enough that for a while you could just login to AIM with an ICQ UID, and impress all your friends with your cool numeric aim account
I just logged in for the first time in over 25 years a few weeks ago. I found https://web.icq.com/ which does not require an email address: only the ID and password. And back then I used a single password for everything.
And it worked! All my old online friends from my childhood were there, my profile message, etc. While most were offline, a few showed up as online and I quickly messaged them!
But my excitement died down as no one responded. Were their accounts hijacked? Is that status invalid? I have no idea. But I was disappointed. It's still cool the service is up all this time.
Thanks, I had no idea what my password was but trying one of the old ones I constantly used back in the day worked :)
I also didn't remember my ICQ# but luckly I found it on a backup from an old website I used to have.
There was also a page where me and my friends were trying to pool togheter our numbers and incentivize people to use it, back when ICQ was being demolished by MSN and AIM... it was a very grassroots attempt that ammounted to nothing lol, but oh whell, at least we tried :(
For at least the last fifteen years I've believed my ICQ account was lost forever, however seeing your post now I decided one last time to try logging in by guessing the password. And it worked!! I can see my old friends list! What a weirdly uplifting feeling!
I tried messaging someone who seemed to be online and got a system reply telling me that my account had been compromised which is entirely possible as 20 years ago I used that same password elsewhere.
Same for me but the day I will really cry a little will be when mIRC dies. It was my introduction to instant effortless free worldwide communication. Of course I haven't used it for decades but it calms me that it is still very alive.
Unlike ICQ, mIRC is just an IRC client and even if it dies, the IRC networks would remain accessible using other IRC clients. That said it'd be a pity if mIRC dies.
Isn't mIRC just a client for IRC (a standard), but ICQ is centralized? Or are there some "mIRC"-branded servers out there that run popular IRC channels?
I remember the music/sound when ICQ used to load up. The logo was brilliant. Nostalgia. Circa 1999-2001 when I used it heavily. Best part though: finding strangers and becoming online friends with many of them (without worrying about scams etc).
I don't know if it's nostalgia or silliness, but I've at various times reused the ICQ uh-oh audio as irssi hilight/putty audio bell sound, SMS signal and Discord voice channel join sound over the years. Usually I find it entertaining the first two or three times and then it acts as a very large stressor.
Yeah, the random chats were definitely the highlight. I recall a level of discourse considerably higher than what you commonly find on eg. Omegle now (or 5 years ago or whenever I last used it, anyway).
58843787 Managed to remember it along with my password from 20+ years ago and it allowed me to login! Really amazing actually it's been around this long.
I wonder how many people went to icq.com and first provided their phone number thinking it was mandatory, then realized there was a "Login with password link", then went back, put in their ICQ UIN, and tried every last password they've used for the past 20 years before finding the one that worked?
Neat trick, Russia!
In any case, I've actually logged in from time to time and only 1 of my 9 friends from the late 90's as nerdy and nostalgic as I actually logged in the past decade and left me a message.
I don't remember my ICQ number but I can remember a dozen F2P MMOs from the early / mid-2000s and most of my usernames but I need to look up `tar -xvzf` every time even with an awareness of the Arnold Schwarzenegger meme.
I find it amusing that I still remember this right off the bat despite not having used it for 15 years, but I don't remember my phone number from the same time period.
Tried to login a few years back to see if any of my old Quake buddies happened to still use it, but couldn't. Support said unless I had the recovery email still, which was at bigfoot.com which has been dead for decades, I was out of luck.
You should keep trying. Looks like your account was not deleted, but check if the name/description matches what you had the last you remember - https://icq.im/4125222/en
Yeah definitely, it was EXo before but I hid it. Because hiding one’s identity was a thing back in the day. Maybe I should try to login, but the logs were local, were they?
Yeah I did not realize how much people like to have low number IDs. I signed up very early on but my friends bailed so I did too. No idea what even happened to that account and the email addresses I used at the time are also lost after being abandoned. Given average password sophistication at the time, I'm sure it got hacked/hijacked at some point.
I didn’t consider that it was a low number, just posted because I remembered it. But I’m also now realizing that wasn’t actually my ID, it was the middle six numbers of a UPC on a 1 1/4 oz 25 cent bag of Doritos in the early 90’s. Oops.
42731249. I still remember this shit without any hesitation, incl. password. And have not used the service for 20 years either.
And then, I continuously forget the name of colleagues I see at least every other day.
3048666
Pretty long but with cool number in it. I thought I forgot a password but looks like my account was deleted, although it still has funny description typical for a young boy.
Friendship started and ended entirely in icq, relationship, whole other things. It was the era for me for sure
ICQ was popular in russian speaking countries in 2006-2009 years, there even was application generator for mobile phones: you was able to choose emoji, styling and other things and receive link to download unique build for your J2ME phone. In the era of WAP it was really impressive
I had a 6 digit one, then lost it, then got 49053668. I've forgotten many passwords but never this. I actually could login to the web app, using the oldest password I used that I can remember, but it doesn't show any old contacts except one. Oh well. So long and thanks for all the <s>fish!</s> great moments!
As someone with a similarly low icq number but I lost the authentication details, I’m happy it’s gone and I don’t need to worry that I can’t remember my password anymore
My wife and I just had a whole conversation about it actually. Amusingly she was not one of the romantic relationships I maintained on ICQ because we were always with each other in person. But both of us had long lasting friendships on ICQ, some of which moved to other platforms, some of which did not.
And I'm still sad 10 minutes later about the relationships that faded when we switched platforms.
Good memories from a more innocent time. The ICQ client truncated long filenames in the UI, so you could send "image.jpg (50 spaces) .exe" which would open an embedded picture and install a back-door while just seeming like regular picture.
I do miss casually texting with people on the computer rather than the phone, and I don't think it's only due to nostalgia or having more leisure time back then:
- If someone was online, it would typically be a good time for a casual, interactive chat. Texting someone on the phone is (at least for me) rarely "live", because it usually happens at an inconvenient time for one of the parties.
- Much faster to type, and easier to copy-paste stuff from other places. Can communicate almost as effortlessly as a spoken conversation.
- Easier to multi-task in case of a slow reply.
I don't enjoy texting on the phone. Millennial logging out for the last time. AFK BRB.
That was my favorite feature. And the random match part, way earlier than ChatRoulette. I remember talking to some kid in the Philippines about the history of her country and mine (Spain). Mind-blowing at the time.
I only use the phone to send messages when I'm not at home, otherwise I use the computer. One of the best things about Telegram is their good desktop client, they even have online indicators like ICQ.
This was true for ICQ as well, in a way. I used some java app on my Sony Ericsson phone back in the day to read and send ICQ messages, but of course back then you had to connect to the internet explicitly, phones weren't always online so it was of limited use but still cool.
don't forget they had terrible security even for the time. In their client you could do text customizations like bold, italic, etc. and they did it by just sending HTML over the wire.
This meant that if you used a custom client (which they didn't allow), you could just send HTML which got evaluated so you could force users to download stuff or send HTML forms or iframes
When this became semi public (in hacker circles) they went after the people talking about it with legal action instead of fixing their stuff
Eww, I wasn't even aware of that. I thought the filename UI issue was actually kind of a subtle fail and I was proud to find it, but that one is terrible.
101919 here. My account got hacked in 1999 and so it's been 25 years since I've been able to login, and yet I remember my UIN the way most people remember their first phone number.
My friend at the time, 101449 was in the first 1500 users; I was late to the game and joined later that afternoon.
I met three people by randomly searching by criteria who are still friends to this day. Erin from Niagara Falls was the first person I had an online voice conversation with. I went to visit Evgenia from Ukraine in St. Petersberg in 2004. I helped Juliana in Sao Paulo practice her English, and went to visit 13 years later.
The thing that was most amazing about the ICQ client was that it implemented a store-and-forward message queue, which was especially important in the dial-up era. That is, someone could send you messages while you were offline, and you'd get them when you logged in.
ICQ was also the first to implement Away, Invisible and DND modes.
While I'm sure that we edit out all of the rough edges in our rose colored memories, ICQ really was the first IM network that felt like a projection of our selves online. NNTP and IRC had their place, but they were radically different interaction modalities. ICQ got a lot of things right that we now take for granted, in an era where techno-optimism wasn't ironic.
Serious question - why do so many people remember our ICQ numbers? I don’t remember what user-facing function it served. Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect?
I suppose it also came at a time for a lot of us where things seemed to wedge into our brains more easily.
When you joined ICQ you received a UIN and that was the only publicly searchable method to connect to other people. You could update your profile with email or username, and manually make that public, but it wasn't searchable by default. If you wanted to connect to a stranger (and the stranger didn't want their email public at the time), you would usually just use their UIN.
It is from a time when we were used to remember phone numbers, and where we shared our phone numbers to keep in touch (calls, sms). ICQ directly picked on that and it was just another „phone number“.
Unfortunately I only remember the first half of mine after so many years. In the age of smartphones, at least my brain degenerated to not be able to recall more than a handful of important phone numbers.
I still remember the phone number I had from when I was 10-19, but I can't remember my sons or my mums phone numbers, or indeed any numbers I've had or used since I was 19 other than my current number that I got in my 30's. Basically, the moment I got my first cellphone in '95 or so, I stopped learning phone numbers, other than remembering my current number because I give it out regularly.
But also, I think, because my parents drilled that old number into me, because remembering it was a "lifeline".
I made a point to memorize my wife's and my parents' cell numbers, just in case I'm ever in a situation where I don't have a phone and need to reach them (like if I got robbed or something).
It's a sensible thing to do, but I have so many ways to get at online services where I can reach them that it hasn't felt pressing - if I'm in a situation where the only phone I can get hold of isn't a smartphone it sounds more like a 999 or nearest consulate kind of situation... But you're right it'd probably be worth doing anyway.
So you get robbed (or something), and you're physically OK but have no phone and no wallet.
You find a phone to use, however you do that, and dial the local emergency number (0118 999 881 999 119 725...3), and maybe they show up and take a report.
And then they leave.
Now, you're in the same situation you were in before (no phone, no wallet) -- nothing has really changed.
I don't think I've ever traveled anywhere where I'd be concerned I would be unable to get at an internet connection long enough to get at my info, including copies of all my documents, or would be unable to find help to arrange transport back to my home or my hotel where I'd have other means. It's feels like a contrived scenario if you travel primarily in developed countries, and mostly urban areas. If I were going somewhere in the middle of nowhere, or a third world country where I'd be concerned about more likely to be targeted, maybe. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but having grown up before cellphones and with no expectation of having easy access to a phone, this obsession with being able to easily contact someone just is very foreign to me still.
> where I'd be concerned I would be unable to get at an internet connection long enough to get at my info, including copies of all my documents, or would be unable to find help to arrange transport back to my home or my hotel where I'd have other means.
I don't even know where to begin getting copies of "all of my documents" online as a native US-born citizen.
> It's feels like a contrived scenario if you travel primarily in developed countries, and mostly urban areas. If I were going somewhere in the middle of nowhere, or a third world country where I'd be concerned about more likely to be targeted, maybe.
I got robbed and beat up walking back from the store in a very clean, well-lit area of a growing city of ~45,000 once -- in Ohio, of all places. I didn't consider myself a target then, and I don't consider myself a target now. But it happened anyway, and if it can happen to me in that seemingly-safe environment, then it can probably happen to anyone else in any other environment.
> I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but having grown up before cellphones and with no expectation of having easy access to a phone, this obsession with being able to easily contact someone just is very foreign to me still.
I'm not saying that your ideas don't have any merit. I also grew up before cell phones and was well into adulthood before they became common.
But I am saying these seem a lot of mental gymnastics to perform in justification of avoidance of the positively arduous and herculean task of...simply committing the phone number for a resourceful friend to memory.
---
And why? Well, because friends are awesome.
"Hey, I'm in San Francisco. I don't have my phone or my wallet. No, no, I'm OK -- I'll tell you about it later. Yeah, some money would help right now. Sure, I can call you back in an hour. Thanks man."
...and soon enough, that resourceful friend will have that sorted well-enough for me that I can at least buy some food somewhere and start getting back towards whatever "normal" is, just as I would do for them.
You miss the point - I have copies of everything I need easily reachable anywhere I can get online.
And if beaten up and robbed, it just seems inconceivable to me that if I can get to a phone to get help, I can't also subsequently get online.
It's not a lot of mental gymnastics - this discussion is the majority of the time I've spent on this in a lifetime. I just don't live in fear of anything like that happening. If I'm ever wrong, then so be it - there are far more risks far more worth caring about to me.
You're obviously free to avoid remembering anyone's phone number for the rest of your existence, and it certainly does not behoove me to attempt to saddle you with such a profound and monumentally exhausting mental debt.
I remember the phone number of my great aunt who lived in East Germany. It was a 12-digit number (including country code). We called her once, maybe twice a year, and usually my mother was dialling. I was maybe around 8 or 9 at the time (it was around 1988).
I cannot even remember the birthdays of people close to me, let alone any phone numbers except my own. But I still remember that f*king 12-digit international phone number from almost 40 years ago...
>why do so many people remember
>I suppose it also came at a time for a lot of us where things seemed to wedge into our brains more easily.
The ~2million years we spent around campfires, repeating oral traditions of our forefathers, instilled a phonetic/rhythmic/mnemonic mechanism of action for remembering "arbitrary" information.
That is why recalling phone numbers, large (mentally untoken-able) words, and the digits of PI all are far easier when done in the sing-song fashion - it is utilizing the highly-optimized linguistic/recall portion, we evolved to handle the near-rote-memorization required to allow our culture to survive.
And that's also why we remember it. It's from a time we used to remember phone numbers (smartphones weren't around, in many countries even normal cell phones weren't widespread yet, and even those had limited memory and usually no way to migrate to a new phone (the SIM could store entries too but had laughably low capacity, like 25 entries with max 9 letters for the contact name)).
So, committing them to memory was just a thing. And our brains get less plastic with age. I can remember my home phone number from 1982, but not my last cell number (before the current one) although I used it for 3 years, as recently as 2014. The insane amount of information streaming in front of our senses probably also triggered some unconscious attitude adjustment (not going to bother remembering any of it, if it's important I'll write it down).
It's a combination of HN users self-selecting for certain traits, and ICQ typically having been used ~20-25 years ago when our brains were a lot more plastic.
I'm not sure what I ate yesterday for lunch, but I just tried my old ICQ, 6697979, and got in on the first try. The password was right in my head, 12 alphanumeric char which don't mean anything, and I never used it for anything else.
Conversely, today I had to use my domain password at work for a system not yet integrated with our 2-factor, and it was quite an effort to remember it, since I hadn't typed it in a week.
Same. The guy didn’t change any of my profile or recovery info, luckily, so I was able to get it back. And then he sent me a message from another account asking why I had taken his UIN. We ended up chatting for a while. It’s a fond memory.
I actually tried to delete that UIN a few years ago, but the support folks wanted me to provide a few UINs from my contact list to verify ownership. No chance I’m going to remember those.
I think it showed it in the client along with your name handle.
Maybe was the easiest way to add people you knew in real life, esp if you didn't make your real name searchable. (Remember at the time people were more paranoid about staying anonymous on the Internet; this was before most social networks.)
I agree with the suggestion that people just don't commit as many things to memory anymore, but that doesn't explain why we still remember certain random numbers from so long ago, while forgetting others. I can instantly recall my ICQ number, but there are plenty of old friends' phone numbers I've forgotten, and those were people I called multiple times a week for years.
Here's a free hypothesis: Maybe it was important to remember your ICQ number. Without it, your message history and contact list was out of reach. In that sense, it fits in the same mental space as a password. What I mean is, there was a cost to losing it. So, you were incentivized to commit it to memory in a way that you weren't with many other numbers.
In contrast, while it would be inconvenient to forget a friend's phone number if you wanted to chat with them, at least you had options. You could generally look them up in the white pages, or call a another friend and get their number, or just ask them when you saw that person again at school the next day.
So, the cost for not remembering a phone number was lower than the cost for not remembering your own ICQ number, and this probably made it mentally stickier.
... Another possibility is a confirmation bias. Maybe we're just not hearing from the 95% of ICQ users who can't remember their number.
448 484 004. It was weirdly easy to remember and like everyone else here, almost 2 decades later I still remember it. I miss those simpler days, Discord makes it much easier to connect with larger groups of people these days but it just isn't the same magic. Or maybe it's all just rose coloured nostalgia glasses? Either way, it's pretty sad.
Mine was only six digits, and it was easy to remember since the first three were "333". I Can still sign in, but my contact list is empty and I have nobody to chat with.
20896111. (I think I had a shorter one that I deleted, back when I was trying it out for the first time, before I had online friends, and didn't know the value of length.)
Isn’t there some study which showed that the maximum length number someone can easily remember is around 7 digits? It’s quite strange tho I remember it too, 3243845
I didn't even remember ICQ had numbers until I read the first comment in this thread posting theirs and most of the number immediately popped into my head, 10238* (cant remember last two).
Makes me wonder what other things in my brain are back in archive, just needing the right push to bring to surface.
Back in the nineties… I set the country of my ICQ account randomly. It was Vanuatu.
One day someone contacts me and ask “are you from Vanuatu?”, so I checked and she was from Vanuatu! So I tell her the truth: “I’m not. Are you?”
And she answers “No, I’m from Venezuela, I missed my country by one in the config...
Later I searched for people on Vanuatu and we two are the only ones“
:)
I have the ICQ "Uh OH!" sound in rotation as a text message alert sound for work/support contacts.
It's pretty jarring, as y'all know, so it doesn't do to have as the default sound, but it it's great for important contacts that don't message much.
Honestly it's a bewildering choice for the default "message received" sound of an IM client. It's so very alarming. I can only guess that the makers were expecting you to be a room away from your tower PC (with its deluxe 18" CRT display and mouse cables that required a screwdriver) to make sure you never missed a message.
These days, when you're never more than a layer of fabric away from your IM, it's a bit much. But man, effective.
Man I gotta say that experience was ruined by the 10 second ad I had to endure ahead of it. I really wish YouTube would just not try to monetize videos that are shorter than the ads.
wipr works great for safari, even on iOS. don’t know of any free options though. There’s also Vinegar, which makes web YouTube videos play in a native matter with PiP.
I tried many times to set this sound as my sms notification sound for nostalgia… and gave up every time. It sounded great on the computer but it’s very jarring and obnoxious on the phone when it runs out of nowhere. Unfortunate because nostalgia
I know this doesn't add much value to the discussion, but I was really proud of my UIN when I was a teenager. And this may be my last chance to flaunt it, so here it is:
1779900
So back in the day, these were known as Universal Internet Numbers, or UINs. You have to admire the sheer audacity of using that name for the user identifiers of a service you're building. I believe they were renamed to "ICQ#" later.
Back in the day, messaging was pretty awesome. You could use an app like Pidgin and pretty much talk to anyone no matter what color their bubbles were.
Today, I have to have one app for all the different ways to get ahold of someone. It's pretty annoying, but we did it to ourselves. Yay.
Agreed. Messaging absolutely blows compared to the glory days of a million interoperable chat clients with no one looking to exploit users for "increased engagement." I miss it all of the time. Beeper's trying to bring it back, but you can see, in real-time, how actively other companies are in trying to lock them out.
These all suck comapred to Pidgen. Pidgen was one UI. This is just a bunch of webapps shoved into the same window/app and it's ugly and awkward as all fuck to use.
I even got a job offer from ICQ back in the day. One of the perks they offered was a small ICQ number ending in zeros.
I didn't take the job offer because I was in high school, though, and wasn't even looking for a job. It's unclear whether they knew that. I'd written some companion program and put it on the internet and they'd found it and were impressed. :)
Hah, cool. I had a similar experience with Xoom.com (the website hosting company). They sent me a job application because I had been volunteering in their forums for a while, assisting people with developing websites.
I still remember going into my parents room to tell them I'm applying for a job and they had no idea what I was talking about. I submitted the application, and the Xoom staff had a good chuckle as they had no idea I was ~14 at the time.
This makes me very sad. Used ICQ throughout Uni in 1999 and met a girl via random chat. We messaged each other for about a year then thought I’d fallen in love — travelled halfway around the world to finally meet her. It didn’t work out but what an experience. RIP ICQ.
Well... I don't know that they ever officially released a protocol spec, but libpurple implements ICQ so at least enough of the protocol was reverse engineered or understood somehow to allow for OSS clients. So I suppose somebody could start from there and build a compatible server. Of course it might wind up only being compatible with Pidgin and other libpurple based clients, and the market for this is probably approximately 16 people worldwide. But still, it would be kinda fun.
What has happened to us that 16M people is something we just laugh at as an inconsequential number, wtf.
I literally meant 16 total people. To be fair, that was a bit of hyperbole, but the point is that there probably aren't a lot of people looking to use an "open source ICQ alternative" in 2024.
That doesn't mean that somebody shouldn't still do it, but it would probably be a passion project, more than something that would make money. At least that's my guess. :-)
When the Russians bought ICQ from the dying AOL and relaunched it, the same protocol was still available and Pidgin worked. But they turned it off after a while, and what a shock, everyone left.
I contacted the company, suggested they bridged it to other protocols, and pointed them at FOSS code that would let them do it. I got a snarky email back saying that what I proposed was impossible -- even though others had done it before. Idiots.
I have to admit, the thought has crossed my mind that it would be kinda cool to build a messaging server with support for ICQ protocol, MSN's protocol, OSCAR (AIM), Yahoo's protocol, etc. Maybe throw in XMPP too.
And in reading up on OSCAR[1] just now, I only just found out that ICQ did use OCSAR as well (at least according to Wikipedia). I never knew that. I had always thought OSCAR was only used by AIM.
I freaked my girlfriend out once because I had my (desktop, a large tower!) computer connected to my stereo. I had left for some reason and there was no music playing, but ICQ would play a little knocking sound when someone logged in. She had heard it three times from the living room, scanned every door and window to find out who was knocking :-)
This reminded me of a random post I think I saw on here about the same thing happening on Club Penguin, I wonder about the last message on there
I had absolutely no connection to the service at all, but the shutdown gave me a weird feeling of loss, perhaps because it was in visual form and the shutdown was recorded on video?
I was 4114934. And I'll express the same sentiment as others: I don't know why the hell I remember that.
A short ICQ number became a matter of pride in certain communities, as some kind of performative early-adopter grandstanding. I imagine that someone, somewhere, out there, is probably still quoting their five/six-digit ICQ number as a badge of honour
Funny how we remember some numbers our entire lives, despite never using them. I can still rattle off my ICQ number, last used nearly 25 years ago, my compuserve ID which I left in 1998, my phone number as a kid, last used about 1994.
I also remember various license plates my family had in the mid 90s, but I struggle to remember my own license plate number now. The only two phone numbers I know are mine and my wife's. I can still remember my high school's phone number though - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it much.
When I was 7, my dad wrote a "game" in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and one section required a "secret" (you could see it if you listed the program...) code to gain access. The code was 32744. I have not used that game for more than 40 years, but it'll probably be one of the last things I remember...
> I can still remember my high school's phone number though - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it much.
Any chance it was a number your parents made you learn, or on a phone list next to / on the phone?
Not from Russia, but pretty close in all senses of the word. It was heavily used in my circles up to about 2010-2011, then started losing market share to other messengers (one¹ of the popular messengers was from the same company that now owns ICQ), and then Telegram came and buried it completely in no time at all.
Russian here — we used it until around 2011, which is when VKontakte introduced instant messages and soon after group chats, so everyone switched to that.
Here's the announcement: https://vk.com/blog/blog131, the title "VKontakte in ICQ mode" is telling. Oh and the contest Pavel announced at the end of that post? I won that with my shoddy MFC app :P
And dunno about AIM, but MSN took a looooong time to implement things like offline messaging. ICQ didn’t (ever?) need the double coincidence of being online. Even iMessage and its fallback SMS today are bad for this.
Fun MSN story: I read you could put curse words in your name subtitle if you used 0x ascii hex codes for one of the characters.
So I pulled up the list of ascii codes and hoped that “beep” would work, but it did not make anyone beep. Then I tried null, and it made all my contacts go offline, and offline again as soon as they logged back in. Again and again. Except myself (can’t remember if that was because I used a 3rd party client aMSN) Hehe. Had people apologize to me for suddenly dropping mid convo.
For everyone proudly displaying their old ICQ numbers, just be aware that there are still sites that have some of the info tied to the numbers archived (presumably what was made public/status). So, there may be some easily-access publicly identifiable information that you don't want associated with your current HN username.
(I just did a search and I found that my old icq# had a phone number linked to it)
ICQ counterpart in Poland at some point started using gg: pseudoprotocol and that allowed more aware people to track others activity across the web as most of us included their UINs in post footers on forums
Oh man, so many memories... Got ICQ in late 1998, and I remember my UIN as well, suprisingly -- unlike the dozen of mobile phone numbers I had over last 20 years.
Internet back then connected you to people who you'd not meet in everyday life, and ICQ was a new unusual place to discuss anything with them.
It gave you a new view of people you knew. I remember in the last grade at school I had some intimate conversations with a female classmate, which I couldn't imagine doing at school in front of many eyes.
It was a dating and meeting app too: rando people would write to other random people. Although these talks were superficial and today I'd see them disenchanting, back then it was an interesting alternatives to offline sociality.
A recall from 2003: me and sister having desktop computers, chatting with all the people on neighborhood LAN and sometimes messaging each other over ICQ -- too busy to walk to the next room and speak.
Then I used it at office work, mostly to appoint dates with girls from another department. At the time, in 2007, it wasn't exclusive anymore, but like a mark of being web-literate, and girls were easier about telling you a UIN rather than a phone.
Then social networks came, and even before mobile integration they were much richer -- all the life went there. Ah, good old days -- make a party, do stupid contests, take photos with a soapbox digital camera, and then pour the entire SD card in the meeting album -- no editing, no removal of closed or red eyed faces, or weird postures or opened mouths. Just let everyone see how fooly they were. And what was different from ICQ was that everybody was aware that everybody was aware. ICQ had no chance, LOL. (edit: And there was Skype too.)
The last time I opened it under Pidgin on Ubuntu in 2010-2011.
My number was 163766, funny how I'll never forget it. Also I've only seen a handful of people with lower numbers than me. I remember when there used to be an ebay market for selling your 6 digit numbers. IIRC they started at 100000? And those were all employees.
I was in elementary back then. Prior to ICQ my online friends and I used PowWow chat if you remember that. It had the funniest robotic voice chat.
The good thing with the time of ICQ was that it was common that 3rd party messengers implemented the protocol. I used QiP and Pidgin. With Pidgin, it was possible to have all chat history across different chat networks (MSN, ICQ, IRC, Jabber) and accounts in once central place. I still have the chat history to this day.
Today, the only multi-protocol clients you get is "Slack/Discord/Teams/etc as tabs inside electron". Every app is isolated and keeps their history.
All these wonderful stories... mine is much sillier.
I didn't have any friends on ICQ - they were all on AIM or MSN. But I was very active on ProBoards (a non-phpBB forum service) and ICQ was the only social icon that I was missing from my mini-profile, so I signed up so I would have something to put there.
Given how vain and overly-focused I was on appearances in that context, I cannot imagine how bad my mental health would have been if social media was available for me.
They somehow deleted/deactivated my account several years ago. Not that I used it much in the last 15 years :)
For those who want to experience ICQ once again, there's http://kicq.ru, an unofficial ICQ server that uses some very old version of the protocol so only QIP 2005 and some versions of Jimm work. Adium doesn't work, unfortunately. My number there is 480976.
Even though it was mostly just Russians wanting to practice their English last time I used it a couple of decades ago I will miss this service.
9805028
What I really miss is the era when every chat service was on an open protocol so you could have a single app that supported everybody no matter what service they used.
All chat platforms (that I can remember) that were popular around that time used proprietary protocols, including ICQ. Everyone I knew preferred third-party clients to the official one, and these clients would sometimes break because ICQ kept changing tiny details in the protocol to try to force users to use the official client. It never worked, of course, because updates that fixed compatibility would usually come within a couple of hours.
I guess not open open, but at least they weren't behind cryptographic walls.
It is an embarassment that in 2024 you still can't send someone an iMessage from a PC or Android phone. Shoot, messaging from a PC in general is hard. No easy SMS access, and even third party apps often have stupid things like "the app is actually running on your phone but you can forward message to some flaky and bloated electron thing on a PC if you really must."
ICQ was the primary tool for my friends and I to play games online ( quake, doom, starcraft, etc ). Not only with each other but people all around the world. Every time we joined a server our list of icq friends kept increasing. I still remembering coming home from school and immediately checking icq. The mid 90s to early 2000s was a real special time.
Wow. People have been keeping the lights on all this time? Incredible dedication. Wishing them many thanks for the amazing years, when the internet felt purely good and we had our lives ahead of us. It meant so much to see the “online” indicator of your love, lit up.
Reminds me of a simpler time when messaging was universal, not a Machiavellian marketing scheme to generate social friction in order to sell more phones.
Even when IM started to break because it was too awesome not to try to monopolize, Trillian (back in 2000!) showed how interoperability was superconvenient to rein in the nascent feudalism and give power back to the users... until the bigger players put a stop to that.
The problem is that the legal system is misused to prevent adversarial interoperability.
Adversarial interoperability was never explicitly welcomed by gatekeepers, but back then nobody would think of suing over it, nor prosecuting such a case.
Nowadays, copyright law is used as a reason to shut those things down, even when the copyrighted content is actually third-party user-generated content or content you do have a license to access since it's freely accessible using the official client.
That's very rose colored. It was only universal if you installed a third-party client and set up each one separately, or installed a half dozen applications.
I was trying a few old passwords, but looks like my account was deleted, probably due to inactivity.
I saw someone commenting about accounts being deleted due to inactivity, so first I tried to find a way to search old accounts. Found in a website this link: https://icq.im/$YOUR_ICQ_NUMBER/en
Replace that by your ID. I checked some of the IDs in the comments here, and you can see the user name. But mine just shows [deleted], and the old description I wrote years, and years ago :-)
No idea what's that tool, and no way I am downloading it. But it's amazing to imagine what would be the "created" and "last modified" stats of the files being served there.
I still remembered my id from all those years ago, 1569200. I was excited to read others were logging in with their old numbers, so I tried the password I thought I had used, but no luck.
I never looked into the protocols in the background, but it was for most of the time very solid and reliable in delivering offline messages, with correct timestamps and all the stuff you would expect as normal.
But Skype was gaining popularity very quickly, and a lot of communication at work got switched from direct person-to-person ICQ or Yahoo Messenger messages, to Skype group chats and calls. Which was really frustrating given how messages were barely functional on Skype basically forever. It would regularly happen that I was offline for e.g. 30 min, someone would send me a message during that time, I would come back online, and then randomly receive that message 2 days later.
In any case - a really solid product, service and one of the big formative parts of my youth and early internet days. Thanks to all the people that made it happen.
It was the first way I chatted privately with a lot of people I met via stuff like internet forums or MUDs. Formed connections that lasted for years (though nothing lasts forever).
I was told to turn on my TV the morning of 9/11 after getting back from my 8am class (central time) by someone on ICQ. I spoke with a friend who was expelled from college to keep in touch with her (for a time) via ICQ.
Thinking back, it is strange how easily I let ICQ go, because it was tied up with a lot of good early internet memories, but I guess that is the way the world works, or more specifically the flow of human emotions across time.
Oh wow, didn't think it was still around!
Don't remember my id number any more, but had great fun using centericq over SSH.
Simpler, better times.
So long and thanks for all the fish!
Hasn't it not actually been ICQ for a while now? I thought the original service with the numbers (387175) was shut down and replaced with something else entirely at some point.
I believe you're right on this. The original ICQ number accounts got merged into AOL Instant Messenger, and for a while you could log into AIM with your ICQ number. I think the original ICQ died when AIM got shut down.
RIP ICQ. I still have logs of chats from highscool. It was really my first foray into the idea of chat. I remember that I once did a presentation for a linguistics class on the use of emoji and the various shorthands that showed up in chat and people were actually interested because it was so new(1).
(1) Yes IRC far predated ICQ but the linguistic norms there differed significantly from ICQ, it was all in my presentation, you had to be there :)
Atari is dead. Shoutcast is dead. Compuserve and GEnie are long dead, AOL is dead too. Outside of forums like these, nobody knows who made the first personal computers or smartphones, because it doesn't matter to them.
It's a lot easier to build the second insant messaging system than the first because you can see how it works before you build it.
there was a big market for short numbers back in the day. i remember buying a 6-digit icq number for a 10€ paysafecard when i was like 14 in a "hacker" forum lol
The hack was to scan ICQ numbers for their associated email addresses, filter by big providers like Hotmail and Yahoo and try to sign up for the same address. Some were abandoned and you could use the username again. Then password-reset in ICQ and voila, there’s your 6-digit ICQ number.
But yeah, I bought a 6 digit number on eBay for 5-10 bucks too ;)
Wow. Blast from the past. Just tried to log in after 20 years and it worked…but I didn’t get farther than it requiring full name and a phone number and lots of other mobile web badness before noping out.
If they still have those account creds and first names, y’all reckon VKontacte has our old messages? :X
Oh well, have great memories, pouring one out for ICQ tonight.
I had no idea that ICQ was still around, but now I'm sad; end of an era. I was more of an AIM guy than ICQ, but I had a tendency to bother creators on Newgrounds, some of which would leave their ICQ numbers, so I would use it occasionally.
There are obvious advantages to newer IM/texting clients, but these old ones were a pretty vital part of my teenage years. The main reason I learned how to type properly was so I could communicate with my friends better on AIM. I spent way too much time figuring out how to use alternative IM clients like Trillian and gAIM so I could avoid advertisements, I spent a lot of time customizing my AIM profile and playing with different fonts, and having friends spam mean with "chain messages". I loved seeing creators from NewGrounds sign on at 4am and still be willing to talk to me.
I'd be a very different person today without AIM and ICQ, for better or worse.
ICQ was my first interaction with computers proper as a kid. My father had just started as a programmer; and the family just got a computer with a Windows 95. Father sets up ICQ so that we can chat and send new year greetings, when he is away fro business. Good times.
It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.
I seek you. This was the first internet messenger I ever used. I met some people playing quake on one of the few servers I could get below 200 ping on. Netman, and BayardBrightBlade, if you're still out there, thank you for an excellent 8th grade.
This is a thread to ask: are there any good/working tools to process the old databases from ICQ 99/2000 versions? Maybe even the Mac version? I have some old backups I'm sure have ICQ DBs on them and it would be cool to dump the contents.
It's definitely possible to read the strings from the dat files with strings (or text editor) but the dat files are a structured database. Two subsequent strings aren't necessarily related to each other, I'd guess they were simply received from the server sequentially.
After posting I went hunting myself and found some interesting things to try:
That's very fuzzy. What about e-mail? Or the phone network? Or the internet in general? Yes, there can be some social aspects to it. But that by itself does not make it into a social network.
Networks have topologies and paths. The social graph matters on facebook because you get connected to your friend's friends which is a core feature of the platform. This is not the case with chat platforms.
What qualities do you consider unique to a "social network" system (beyond its own self-marketing or the time-period in which it arose) that aren't qualities already present in ICQ, E-mail, IRC, newsgroups, etc?
One distinct quality is that as a user you actually have the possibility to navigate the network. On ICQ you only see your own contact list. You cannot see how many friends/contacts/followers/relations anyone else has. You cannot traverse the network from your direct friends to indirect friends.
A social network puts the connections you have with other people prominently on display for everyone to see. The number of "friends" you have is a central social status metric on social networks.
It is only a chat platform and it predates the first social networks (which were explicitly called "social networks" back then). This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but I think people use the term "social network" way to much so that it doesn't even mean anything any more.
My brain doesn't remember much, but i remember my handle; 376930 - from those early days of whining modems and the sheer excitement of talking to people from all over the world. As a kid it opened up my entire world.
I remember a few years ago when I logged back in after all those years it asked me to change my password ... because the old one was three letters long, definitely from a different era :)
ICQ was probably my first instant messaging. Even before I found IRC.
My older brother had a 5 digit number, and I remember knowing mine by heart at some point.
I also remember very early putting together like a mental map where different regions were on instant messaging. It became more clear as MSN Messenger was being rolled out that eastern europe stayed on ICQ and AOL while US and western Europe were being migrated over to MSN faster.
Am I the only one who was shocked to see this still exists? Honestly I thought it was shutdown a long time ago. It does bring back very fond memories, however.
I assumed it was already dead, just on a lark I went to sign in and it appears to require a phone number now, not my old number? so I guess it has not actually been "ICQ" in a while?
edit: ah, they're doing the odious "use an sms to allow your account to be compromised login" instead of passwords. Then they say "your account has been compromised" until you add a phone number
yeah, that was my edit but I realize I didn't actually clarify that just what it was doing. But it then will just claim your account has been compromised until you give them a number :D
ICQ was the best IM to ever exist. It was - at least here - pitifully killed by MSN, a much worse tool that had the advantage to be included in Windows.
I still have to find a tool as good as ICQ was. Of course, there were bugs and I would expect more from it today (I'm thinking of the app back in 2004), like video support, but still, no one bested it UX and features.
Not only is this sad, it makes me feel old. Its just another reminder that the Internet of the late 90s/early 2000s is dead and not coming back. Instead its been replaced with corporate blandness and faux outrage.
Whatever the oldest age you could set on ICQ, I did and dialed it back a few days to make it believable. They had a directory you could sort by age and I was in third or fourth place. At 18 I was getting “are you really 102?” messages all the time. 90s girls were surprisingly eager to send nudes as I quickly learned. I miss it.
So, I found a grey t-shirt at a thrift store in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It has a professionally embroidered ICQ logo on it.
No idea where it came from or how it ended up there. I don't think they had a Canadian office. I've had it since 2015, it's fun to wear out and find your fellow xennials in the wild.
Anyone have a theory as to where the shirt came from?
Fond memories of spending time late into the early morning hours chatting with friends and meeting new people during summer break. Even had a short UIN!
Even if something new came along now, it won't recreate the magic that was the internet of yesteryear.
At this point, it is us that are too different. The nostalgia only has sentimental value.
When my best friend took his live in 2007, I backed up our whole ICQ chat history. Nearly 350000 messages. From time to time I read parts of our texts and it instantly brings me back to our teenage years. We shared everything via ICQ, it reads like a detailed log of our friendship.
2558361. Uh-oh. It feels weird how my ICQ UID has stuck to my head although so well. Just tested the online version and it was funny to see the contact names. Too bad the messages were not there. I think I have the db from old old pc somewhere, perhaps it is time to try installing it one more time.
I remember there was one level of Notpr0n¹ that required looking for an ICQ UIN. I guess new players won't be able to pass it without looking for the answer somewhere else.
Such a good number. This account is where I learned the lesson "don't use a password from the dictionary". :-(
It was sad to see lose to much MUCH inferior chat networks, like MSN messenger. It was back when Microsoft could crush anyone (even the chat system), by just shipping it with Windows.
I went on a few dates by randomly messaging people with girl-sounding names in the city I lived in. It took some work, but way less than getting to a night club. I'd always do that before visiting a new city... And sometimes had a date lined up by the time I arrived.
All my friends left it years ago and moved to either whatsapp or fb messenger, some opted for telegram. From what people wrote in appstore it seems that GG become some kind of social network filled with spam and scam profiles.
I tried to log in by site right now and my password isn't recognized anymore; and it also seems to be loading something from tiktok there
Fond memories of uni, standing in front of a dorm with dozens of students using ICQ inside. Sounds as if someone had just unloaded a truckload of Teletubbies in the yard, "Uh-Oh"'s coming from every direction in a hilarious cacophony.
But it’s gone. I remember all my old passwords from 2000. But I also remember about 10 years ago changing those everywhere to secure passwords. I even distinctly remember doing this for ICQ despite not using it anymore. But it’s not on my password manager.
I used to have a 6 digit too, but lost it long ago. ICQ was an important part of my youth. ICQ and AOL Chatrooms were the earliest places where I learned I could find groups to talk with about similar interests.
EDIT: How would I even log in to take a peek? It won't accept my US phone # and my (old, insecure) passwords that I likely used no longer work (and I can't seem to use that number as the login!)
My finnish phone number did not work either with web login, although I dont think I ever saved it anywhere back then. But succeeded to login with UID and password that I have luckily been keeping in safe (post-its first in the 90s, keepass nowadays)
yeah I use firefox's secure password store of late with long passwords generated either automatically or via a dictionary-word password generator I created
Oh man. It's the end of an era. I still have my ICQ number for 1998 memorized (62125812). I was a bit late the the internet game, ICQ was the first real platform where I met people who, still to this day, I consider friends.
Goodbye world! So long!
It was a memorable one... Since 20+ year! It'll live on in my memories!
Signing off for the one last time!
-----------------------
-= 67804916 =-
==End of Transmission==
-----------------------
End of an era. When I was a little kid ICQ was my first messaging program. It was the first time I spoke to someone over the computer. Even though I have not used it in a long time it gives me feelings of nostalgia.
I was an ICQ user but I haven't logged in since the early 2000s I would guess? I have a faint recollection of maybe using Trillium during its heyday with ICQ maybe in the 2003-2004 time period?
Sometime in 1997 ICQ banned underage users due to some legal issue they perceived. I changed my age on my account to see what would happen, and got banned, no way to recover.
Man, loved ICQ. I used to text chat to the early hours with this Greek girl I met online. It was platonic but we got quite close and exchange physical letters and actually met up a couple of times. Good times.
I think ive heard this before....did matt damon sing a song about sleeping with your gf so then you took off to find this girl and ended up going on a tour across europe with your best friend and a pair of twins?
I was really surprised when a recovery mechanism was launched many years ago. My account wasnt comprised. It still had the same dumb password from way back -- my first highschool girlfriends name and a number.
"name of some girl i liked at the time" plus a couple numbers if needed for shorter names... That was basically the template we all used at first, in those innocent days.
Dozens of megabytes of text, jokes, arguments, dramas, casual and professional socialising, and hundreds of new acquaintances that have shaped my interests in life. Thanks for an interesting 2000s.
I liked it but the problem was that it didn't have contact list sync, server-based scrollback and other mod cons. And of course that they totally screwed it up with adware.
They repurposed it into a Telegram clone a few years ago, they even had nearly the same bot API and you could import stickers. The desktop client is also a near copycat. It was called "ICQ New"
ICQ is/was mainly for one-to-one and small group chats, much like Signal or WhatsApp. I don't think that use case needs a large moderation staff; I consider even having the ability to do most kinds of moderation an anti-feature in that kind of tool since it means the communication is not truly private.
It’s been over 20 years since I used it, but I still remember my ICQ number by heart. It’s burned in there so deep I can recall it more quickly than my kid’s birthday.
Instant messengers were great — better than texting and better than posting on FB/Twitter IMO. I loved away messages, which were ephemeral and not spammed to your network. We're getting a little of that functionality with iOS's DND status, but it's not customizable.
My theory is that FB didn't want to enable away messages because then people would just set it once and not log in for a long time. It's a shame that a feature that was common 20 years ago is now only starting to make a comeback.
Has anyone made a patch or proxy to keep this alive by redirecting the client to their own rogue server? Could entice me to reinstall the software and come back.
Wow, after all this time I thought everything was gone.
But sure enough, my login for worked and they are all there, all my contacts.
Farewell from 252972013
less than quarter mil number, that's very very early on! mine is over 3.8 million, and I created it relatively early on considering I was living in Europe :)
I think I remember my number because back then when you had to reinstall software or put it on new machine you always went by your number, instead of your email or username. That's why I think I still remember it :)
Noooo! Not ICQ! I only haven't used it for 20 years! But it was kinda cool, like AIM. Except why was their sound always "oh-OH?" And why was it called "ICQ"? I heard it was short for "i seek u" but that's kinda dumb, ain't it? innit?
I couldn't find how to check for numbers so I just typed in icq.com/xxxxxxxxx and saw my name. Then I thought well no way I will remember my password, but then I remembered I used the same five letter password all the time back then. And voila it works. Who needs a password manager when you are naive, computers are slow and you need to access memories from times when you weren't overloaded with information.
I will say I don't have many fond memories of it, it was difficult to use it in the days of dial up. Things also changed quicker than today, I think from 2002-2010 we went from ICQ to yahoo to Skype to msn to others and back. But it was my first <3
And yet Gadu-Gadu, its Polish clone, is chugging along after its userbase has been decimated by Facebook Messenger (WhatsApp did not take over the market as much as in the other EU countries).
Being self-hostable it can never die completely but lets face it, in most communities it's a hollowed out husk of what it used to be since Discord took off.
My reading (and maybe I'm wrong because the comment was terse) is that IRC will never die, because it is not a commercial interest that can be shuttered. It's an open protocol and anyone can spin up a server.
Any community you build inside a walled garden can be taken from you. I do think that is important to keep in mind.
It can't die because of that, but the reason we use things like reddit and discord and slack is because those are not open protocols -- they have monied interests behind getting people to use them
The idealism of the internet in the 80s and 90s never could survive past the growth phase.
I don't use reddit, discord and slack because they are not open protocols. I use them because of the network effect and only reluctantly. Look at the relatively recent success of software like bittorrent and know that idealism and commercialism both live and die by the network effect. We aren't doomed to live in walled gardens forever.
I think you can credit a win to IRC recently, too, when someone tried to buy control of Freenode and it seems (as least as an onlooker) that everyone successfully coordinated upping stakes and moving to a new network. I don't use IRC, but I find that impressive.
I think everything you said was true, but I would point out that I think of this as a practical rather than ideological position. I'm not saying it never makes sense to build inside of a walled garden, I'm saying there is a costly tradeoff. I would speculate that it might be more important going forward, but time will tell.
Discord's main "ease of use" features: Centralized user management, centralized server discovery, server hosting
What it does technically could be replicated by current technologies.
Emojis, video streaming, screen streaming.
Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord just rely on Nitro subscriptions?
> Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord just rely on Nitro subscriptions?
It's a gold mine of data for things like market research, ad targeting/fingerprinting, and more recently AI training.
But would IRC be what a post-Discord exodus actually goes back to? Lacking basic modern amenities like seamless scrollback and push notifications is going to be a hard sell for the generation that grew up with Discord. As a sibling mentioned, Matrix is closer to the mark.
Doesn't matter. IRC serves a niche that there's always a community for that no matter how small it'd become. I'd place a bet that it won't die as long as there's computer and internet. Long live IRC.
Both are doable with modern servers and clients thanks to v3 chathistory. Ergo (server) and Goguma (mobile client) in particular make this work very nicely.
A few weeks ago I shut down my self hosted znc bouncer that I still logged in every few weeks to download logs, see if I got pinged somewhere and catch up with some low traffic channels.
I then switched over to https://www.irccloud.com and it's such a improvement as I can use it on my phone, now I'm pretty active again and I kinda missed it.
For IRC bouncers there's many, but I'm not aware of anything that has a web interface, phone app, push notifications and all kept in sync. The market is pretty small.
Alternatively there's many bridges these days so you can use Matrix with one of the many apps supported.
> I'm not aware of anything that has a web interface, phone app, push notifications and all kept in sync.
IRCCloud does. Or if you want an open source stack: Soju as bouncer, Gamja as web interface, and Goguma as Android app. If you have a paid Sourcehut account you get Soju+Gamja hosted for you at https://chat.sr.ht/ .
I'm not sure The Lounge and Quassel support push notifications, but they otherwise fit your requirements.
The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.
Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country.
But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autism spectrum, that was one of the best feelings I had at that time.
Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN. I see a direct line from there to the annoying easy-to-accept-while-hard-to-reject-but-always-there-anyway cookie pop-ups.
And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings. ICQ just had a great user experience as far as I am concerned and to this day I prefer it to existing alternatives from WhatsApp to Webex chat (don’t mention Teams please, I’m having a poetic moment). It was rather a feeling that perhaps other Brazilians will share: a longing, saudade, for the simpler (yes) but better and more poetic 90s, when ICQ connected you to a world that watched Brazil win the fourth World Cup, Ayrton Senna was inspiring generations to be healthier and their better selves and Mamonas Assassinas could only make us laugh, not cry…
So long, ICQ. You will always be part of why I love the internet.
PS: I realize the timing of those events doesn’t necessarily align. But sentimentally they do.