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When AIM Was Our Facebook
Hugh Pickens writes "Gizmodo reports that there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. 'Everyone had an AIM handle,' write Adrian Covert and Sam Biddle. 'You didn't have to worry about who used what. Saying "what's your screenname" was tantamount to asking for someone's number — everyone owned it, everyone used it, it was simple, and it worked.' When we all finally got broadband, it was always on and your friends were always right there on your buddy list, around the clock. AIM was the first time that it felt like we had presences online, making it normal, for the first time ever, to make public what you were doing. 'Growing up with AIM, it became more than just a program we used. It turned into a culture all its own—long before we realized we'd been living it.'"
He must have lived in a parallel universe. In the 90s it was IRC.
I had a 5 digit ICQ number, and was a regular on the Compuserve CB simulator... AIM being old school..... PfffT!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Howsabout "no".
My "online presence" predates my AIM account by over a decade and a half. The only reason I wound up picking up AIM with Trillian was because one or two of my relatives have AIM accounts.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Overintellectualization is a disease. Relax on the deeper meaning, folks, and enjoy life.
So, now that Facebook is the new AIM... how long before the next thing makes Facebook the old AIM? And what fears should those that actually use the damn thing have when all that personal information breaks into the open like a New Orleans dam?
there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. "Everyone had an AIM handle
Bullshit. I bet the authors thought AOL invented Usenet in Sept. 1993 as well.
Trolling is a art,
Nostalgic about AIM are we?
My god, if I don't put a message in my .plan, people might wonder why I'm out of the office.
All requests to VMS PHONE will go unanswered.
--
BMO
Now we get to hear a bunch of repeated "jokes" about AOL. (AOL still exists?, queue up 10 jokes about the CDs and floppies they mailed out, etc.)
For you people who once had a billing problem with AOL 10 years ago? Get over it.
AIM was powered by a server and protocol called OSCAR: the Open System for Communication in Realtime. Ironically, this protocol was about as closed and proprietary as you can get, and required reverse engineering over a span of years before AOL released TOC (Talk to Oscar) and TOC2 to developers.
Didn't Facebook just recently call their datacenter architecture "open" too?...
"AIM was the first time that it felt like we had presences online"
Ah, no, I'd have to say it was IRC for anyone with any amount of computer savvy that grew up in the 90's. And if you wanted a "fancy" dockable IM client that supported offline message sending, then it was ICQ from about 1996 onwards. In fact, the "send to offline contact" feature of ICQ was great and AIM didn't support it for years afterwards. Not to mention that the first AIM clients were poorly written, buggy, and were vulnerable to all manner of exploits. ICQ was, at first, superior to AIM in every way.
I first got on the net around 1982, and I never had an AIM ID until Apple cut a deal with AOL to share logins for iChat.
I'm nostalgic for FIDO and USENET.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Only in our day it called ICQ, not AIM.
GOML.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. "Everyone had an AIM handle,"
I think you misspelled "stigma". I was an ICQ user back when they were still just a small Russian outfit and became super-crappy. But I still didn't use AIM because it was associated with AOL, and figured that AIM users should just have a big "L" on their forehead. :)
Much later, I installed GAIM and then put into it my ICQ, Yahoo! and AIM account (reluctantly signed up). Then GAIM was renamed to something else... then I realized I didn't want or need instant messaging much anymore and uninstalled it.
These days the only IM I use is Google Talk (via browser) or Skype client. [oblig. get off my lawn]
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Or bbs for that matter? It's all the same, just that aim was big in that it was scene(sic).
About 1/4 of the people I knew had an AIM account, about equal to those who used ICQ. Hotmail/MSN was the dominant force in the UK
Who couldn't see the slash snobs ripping this apart? This is typical of any site, people are rude and feel they have to rip everyone apart.
IRC was and still is my main communication method.
I was in ICQ via a game I played in internet (utopia). :)
MSN was my communicating software that I used with casual people that didn't know or hang in IRC all the time
But I remember when AIM was a Bukakke site.
Everyone I knew who was online used msn messenger. I never knew a single person who used AIM.
Maybe it's a generational or geographical difference?
For comparison, I grew up in Atlantic Canada and graduated from high school in 2005.
Now you got your fancy computers, and your cellphones, and your automobiles. In MY day, if you wanted to socialize, you had to ride your mule to a barn dance. And you had to walk in smelling like a mule and actually *talk* with a bunch of illiterates who also smelled like mules. AND WE WE BETTER FOR IT!
I'll tell you damned kids the same thing my grandpa once told me: "Now you got your fancy barn dances, and your mules..."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In the late 80's before I ever heard of Usenet or Internet I belonged to a dozen social dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (back in the day when we all wanted to be a SySop). When I wasn't in high school I was dailed in with my blazing fast 300 bps acoustic modem.
I also has a CompuServe membership, which was AOL before there was an AOL.
Was /. spamming AIM as well?
was it /. that caused it to go down?
http://imgur.com/QDzXE
But AIM wasn't that popular over here in the UK, and I suspect the same situation in most other countries.
Facebook/Myspace/etc are used much more widely than AIM ever was.
In the 90s it was IRC.
In the '90s it was definitely IRC (although it certainly wasn't ubiquitous for everybody). In the late '90s, ICQ popped up. When I went to college in the early '00s, though, it was the first time everyone I knew in a community used such a messaging/presence system, and it was AIM. Those, like me, who had never used AOL created an account just because so many people already had them.
In my opinion, it was much preferable to the Facebook of today. Conversation could be ephemeral (even though I kept logs)--posting anything to Facebook, even a "private message", feels like filing every word into the eternal register.
For less tech savvy consumers, it was AIM. Most geeks used ICQ and some even remember talk. AIM for us brought too many associations with Eternal September and we avoided those users.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I remember when I first started using AIM I made my first international friend. She was from Scotland and 20 years later I still remember her handle. We lost touch and I've often wished that I could somehow find her again.
I still remember our first conversation. We both thought each others' accent was hilarious.
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
That isn't the point of this article.
Of course AIM didn't invent messaging. But AIM is what made it accessible to non-geeks.
I was watching movies on my computer 8 years ago, but Netflix lets my Mom do it. In the same way, I hand an IRQ account in 1992 (which did *not* make me a pioneer) but it wall all computer voodoo to my friends and relatives until AIM arrived in their physical mail a couple years later as part of their AOL cd.
AOLers...and those who ruthlessly teased AOLers. Back then, anyone with a "real" reason to be on the internet had serviceable IT skills (and at least one other account than their home access). AOLers were the drooling masses so to speak. They were a clueless and rare sight, like a coyote darting across the highway on your drive to work and our minds, just as oblivious to disaster.
But, that era birthed one of my favorite memes:
</AOL>
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
But it's not in the form of iChat, MSN Messenger, or other proprietary protocols which have muddied the waters of collaboration in order to control a niche of the market.
Look up XMPP. It's an open standard. It's open source. Google talk uses it. I can chat in windows linux or mac with it. People on other platforms can chat with people on other platforms. It supports group chat. There are open source clients and server software available. It works great. Why use anything else?
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
In the 90s I remember IRC, ICQ and Usenet. I'm kind of a late-comer, as I have a 7-digit ICQ UIN. However, I think most of the fun or destruction came from scrolling chat rooms later on, such as HotelChat.
I do find it interesting that there are all these nostalgic "back in the day" stories on Slashdot of late. I have a feeling that this completes the passing of the Geek Torch from Gen X to Gen Y.
do() || do_not();
Just as I now shun having a facebook account, AIM was what I shunned back in the day.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Subject says it all. The community was the server. Academics, we daisy chained logins to meet on servers in different physical institutions...
It's surprising to me that a lot of IM clients are still around with the prevalence of texting. On top of that, most phones now have constant connectivity to things like facebook so people are almost never out of touch. Despite all this I regularly see people using AIM (albeit through other clients like trillian and digsby) or MSN (again through other clients). As a youngin' in these parts I do remember using AOL 8 where screen names and chatrooms were cool and that's where we'd all go to talk about Toonami or setup games of starcraft.
Remember when talking to someone face-to-face was our facebook?
Yeah, it was much better back then. No constant worrying about our collective statuses and what we did over the weekend that was fun to do in real life. We just got together and did things TOGETHER, in real life.
Life was much more enriching when you actually looked the person in the eye you were talking to, and had an actual CONVERSATION.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Naw. Q-Link (Quantum Link) was AOL before AOL. Because it WAS AOL before the name change and the switch to GeoWorks on IBM-PCs.
Fun times, what with the shareware, freeware, and modules for Unlimited Adventures and ZZT. Went downhill, but hey, fun in the early days.
I'm not typical, but I still have an AIM account as well as Yahoo IM and Gtalk. I use Yahoo IM a lot. The thing is that they're almost completely interchangeable and the only reason to have one account over another is where your friends are. I'm not sure why the article is focusing on AIM. AIM might not be a well used IM service anymore, but IM is still relevant. What's really changed? Did anyone really care whether it was AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google running the IM service?This is false nostalgia.
Methinks Gizmodo read too much into this AIM phenomenon than it really was... IRC was around, people didn't use it as it required a lot of manual setup with many clients. However, there was also ICQ, which started BEFORE AIM and was pretty popular also. Within 2 years of launching, Yahoo messenger and MSN messenger was in the fray. So I don't know what microcosm this dude came from, but while AIM was popular, it only had a very short-lived dominance in my mind and I never noticed a culture around it (I noticed one around the ICQ world more than AIM).
That being said I still have my AIM handle - it is used in my GTalk pane in GMail. I talk to one person with it, sometimes, thinking of just ditching it and staying with GTalk.
I used ICQ back in 97 or 98 as my first IM proggie. It was pretty neat, and I remember the "uh oh!" sound when getting a message - before it got old and I turned it off.
I also remember the 'A Current Affair' sound effect when someone asked to be your friend, or whatever. I still even remember my old ICQ number, lol.
I eventually moved to AIM because it was what 'everyone' used. And by 'everyone' I just mean the average computer user/porn surfer. I discovered IRC in probably 2000 because of DALNet, and all of the Dragon Ball Z episodes you could download from there in "HIGH QUALITY!!!!" lol.
Good times.
is for morons.
Facebook uses for its messaging interconnection, the XMPP protocol, witch is specified by RFC 3920 and RFC 3921.
so i guess its pretty open
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is this on /.? For people who thought (like "Good Morning America") that AOL was synonymous with "Internet" it might be appropriate but for the rest of us (and the early adopters of Slashdot) it was IRC and ICQ. We laughed at AOL and most of us tried to get any friends off of it as quickly as possible. Some of us even started local ISPs just so they could actually get onto the Internet. This sort of article might be appropriate for the New Yorker or Wall Street Journal but for Slashdot it's drivel.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Back in the heydays of the mid-nineties, I started hanging out in chat rooms. The quick conversations in those places did what a year of typing classes failed to do - taught me to type without looking at the keyboard. My fingers may not be on the exact keys, and I get thrown off on non-Microsoft standard keyboards (I had to get rid of an HP laptop that had media keys on the left side), but I can type around 70 WPM with a 95% accuracy rate. All thanks to AOL.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
never used that AIM crap, only e-mail for communication
My very first foray into IRC when I was a teen ended up with me getting banned from my first visit to a newbie room because I mentioned someone had told me it was a great place for downloads. Which it was, of course, but the IRC admins were paranoid, and banned newbies who came in looking for warez. It all worked out, though - within a month, I was smashing F5 with the best of them trying to get a precious download slot for episodes of Sailor Moon.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Ahh the early days of Q-Link on a 9600 baud modem. I remember giddly swapping porn pics and thinking it was so cool because I wasn't getting busted by the FBI or anything. It seems so harmless and naive now, but back then being 19 it was exciting times. I think Q-Link knew what their users were doing, but were happy to to ignore it since they were charging by the minute.
Facebook uses non-federated XMPP. Google Talk, in contrast, uses federated XMPP. The difference? I run my own XMPP server, and I can chat to anyone using Google Talk. I can't chat to any Facebook users.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
XMPP is now specified by RFC 6120 and RFC6121, but don't mind that. I think GP was referring to http://opencompute.org/
I was thinking about this the other day, the birth of online status messages and how having it all in one place was actually a bigger step towards 'online presence' than Twitter or Facebook brought us
The good ol days of IRC. I'm only 22, and I remember a buddy and I having LAN parties and him and I would be the ones who lasted throughout the night. We'd spend hours upon hours lurking through IRC servers and channels looking for triggers to use to browse people's available (*cough* legal *cough*) movies, music, programs, ect.
We always used trillian for aim, icq, and msn... Because you could be on all of your accounts at once.
Ah, the good ol days.
Not sure what he is talking about. I never had an AIM account nor did any of my friends really. ICQ was another story however, everyone and his dog used it. Maybe he is confusing AIM with AOLs purchase of ICQ later on. Then Skype came along, with it's killer feature voice support. Now I am stuck with Skype, but cannot get rid of it. I am trying to use Jabber as much as I can, but it is difficult if not many other contacts use it. Jabber support from Gmail, Facebook and iChat helps somewhat. It is really great that you can just host your own Jabber server and by your real email address be your Jabber account.
Gizmodo is to tech as Jerry Springer is to news. Tell me why we should take anything posted there seriously. Most of the time, they are just talking out of their collective ass.
here in macedonia around 10 years ago irc (everyone said mirc) was the main thing, then blogs and now facebook. IM wise its ICQ > MSN > Skype
This is instant messenger, not full blown AOL. It cost nothing. Plenty of people were on it; sorry you weren't.
Welcome Back -- I can see you haven't been to slashdot in a long while.
Here in Canada AOL was not really a player in the ISP market. After dialup died off in the mid nineties I stopped seeing those AOL discs all together. I didn't even know what AIM was until I read the article. Almost everyone that I knew used ICQ in the 90s with a sprinkling of MSN Messenger. MSN took over in the early 2000s
Maybe AIM was US only?
I have an AIM handle but also a couple netscape.net email addresses (which also gives me aim.com addresses of the same handle since the buyout) that dates from around 1998. I pushed AIM out at my workplace around then and while I tried to enforce decent naming conventions (firstlast) even then people wanted cooler handles. Now here comes facebook telling everyone to use their real information....bah.
I feel like the odd man out here. Maybe the rest of you are lucky enough that all your friends are reasonably tech-savvy, but I find that we're rather the rare breed in the southern part of the United States. In the '90s AOL was one of the largest service providers in the US. If you were on AOL, you had a screen name. Nearly all my classmates and a large portion of my relatives had AOL (and so did my household). I added my friends and family to my buddy list so I could chat with them. The small handful of people in my age group that didn't have AOL downloaded the AIM client so they could still chat with the rest of us. It really didn't seem practical to ask all my friends to find an IRC client, learn how to use it, decide on a server where we would chat and hope that they could get their nick registered there when I could instead ask simply, "What's your screen name?" and be able to chat with them whenever they were online.
So far as presence goes, they're talking about away messages. When you put an away message up on IRC, it doesn't broadcast it to the entire channel (thankfully), people have to go slightly out of their way to retrieve it. With AIM, you might send someone an IM while they were away and were answered with a little blurb that would (sometimes) let you know what they were up to. As we gained the ability to set not just away messages, but status messages, people typically kept them more relevant to what they were doing. Mousing over a friend's name to see what they're doing is certainly more straightforward for the typical PC user than anything on IRC.
What's killing me is that my friends are now scattered all over the place. I used to be able to talk to almost everyone I knew on AIM. Now, a lot of them don't run a chat client anymore and I only see them (online) when they log into Facebook. Those that do run a chat client have largely moved to Skype because web-cams are just the coolest. I'm by no means an AOL/AIM fanboy, but those of you protesting so vehemently were apparently just not in the right place (the US) at the right time (the '90s) to know just how ubiquitous it really was in the general populous.
I was a hipster from the 300baud days too. I had text-based compuserve on a c64, watched prodigy go online, tried the first bbs's, and yes, I had a 5 digit ICQ too. I was the first on my block for 386, 486, PII, AMD. I've tasted the birth of just about every major online innovation, and a hell of a lot that failed and nobody even remembers.
But people I used to consider late coming wanna-be hipsters were using Geocities, haha... so my definition of late-comer is now the definition of old-timer.
I work with a guy that actually used punch cards. No academic, but actual production. He also knows Fortran pretty well. He thinks I'm a youngin'! It's all perspective.
I8-D
Another american-centric, narrow visioned piece, DESPITE there's nothing barring even americans from learning what is, and has happened outside their own country :
while you were all 'growing up with aim', rest of the world was growing up with ICQ. and i mean, the world. not a mere country.
i know you americans do not like being disturbed in your self-indulgence and being called out on your self-centeredness, but hey - someone has to do it, so you can integrate with the rest of the WORLD. yeah, you heard right - i said WORLD - there is a whole world out there in which a lot of things happen outside america.
Read radical news here
Everyone I know still uses AIM as their primary IM protocol, although I don't know anyone who uses the official AIM client (is there still one?). Had to go with AIM early on because that's where everyone else was. I use Adium in OS X, Pidgin otherwise, and since they can both handle any protocol you could care to name it doesn't make sense to change my screen name every time a new one comes out. Skype has somewhat replaced AIM, but mostly we only start up Skype when we want to voice or video chat, when we are just using instant messaging it's still AIM, which most of the people I know leave running all the time their computer is on. Skype hasn't replaced that functionality for some reason.
The Pirate Bay is my App Store.
Depends on who you knew, I guess. Nobody I knew actually subscribed to AOL, but everyone used the AOL Instant Messenger service to chat.
This is pretty well the exact sort of thing I think of whenever anyone tries to convince me that Facebook is the absolute end-all be-all pinnacle of social computing, will never EVER go away or be replaced, has way too much momentum to be stopped or made irrelevant, and is teh EVARYTHING!!!1! about being online. I just think back to how MySpace was exactly as unstoppable. Same with Friendster. Or LiveJournal. Or Geocities. Or MSN Messenger. Or AIM. Or ICQ. Or IRC. Or...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Over here ICQ was more the thing, and even with many Americans I knew at the time. Before that it was Compuserve but we all got off that as soon as we found there was much more to see on Usenet.
Korma: Good
lol at the guy who thinks AIM is synonymous with using AOL.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Why is this on /.? For people who thought (like "Good Morning America") that AOL was synonymous with "Internet" it might be appropriate but for the rest of us (and the early adopters of Slashdot) it was IRC and ICQ. We laughed at AOL and most of us tried to get any friends off of it as quickly as possible. Some of us even started local ISPs just so they could actually get onto the Internet. This sort of article might be appropriate for the New Yorker or Wall Street Journal but for Slashdot it's drivel.
Uhh... yeah I would have to agree with you. I didn't think AIM was very popular, at least not at the level this stupid article makes out to be. ICQ was the top IM client in the 90's. Everyone had an ICQ number, I knew very few people with an AIM handle. You could guarantee that if someone used IM they used ICQ. The same could not be said for any other client.
IRC was never terribly popular with the "mainstream," though. Just us tech geeks.
This whole story is a load of bunk.
What I disagree with is that AIM is dead today. I still use it (and Yahoo) to chat with many friends on a daily basis, and not 'cos I'm a n00b; I've been online since the 80's like many of you.
I use it because there is still not a good alternative to AIM. Facebook chat is unreliable, Facebook posts are not instant and require a web browser, ICQ and IRC are too complex for I.T. neophytes to understand, and texting costs $. What exactly has "replaced" AIM whereby you can type in realtime for free using a reliable, dedicated client and can explain to even the most basic of users how to use?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I HATE any article written by anyone that talks about how "everyone" used something, and used it in a certain way. I've been on the WWW since 1995, just after I finished college, and NO ONE I know just assumed everyone had an AIM handle, or even used IM. When the author says "everyone" he probably means "everyone at my school." I've heard the same thing about kids asking "what's your myspace?" In some circles, yes, but not all.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
CB simulator was the bomb in the 80's.
I used irc for #weezer on efnet. I used AIM to talk to girls. /me sighs.
we speak of facebook in the same way
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
My only use of AOL was as a connection for my Trumpet WinSock connection. Most of their services were totally useless and the popup ads were intolerable. I looked down my nose at AOL users.
I have no use for Facebook today and feed the same way about it.
while you were all 'growing up with aim', rest of the world was growing up with ICQ. and i mean, the world. not a mere country.
Nobody ever did ANY growing up on AIM, ICQ, IRC, Myspace, or Facebook. Any growing up that took place concurrently with the use of AIM, ICQ, IRC, Myspace, or Facebook happened in-spite of not due to AIM, ICQ, IRC, Myspace, or Facebook.
-- QED
Just like today. Only now you say 'I am a moron' by talking about Farmville (or anything else on facebook.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Even my "non-computer" friends knew that AOL was something only Grandma did because she was afraid of the computer. I think its far fetched to say asking for your AIM screen name was like asking for a phone number.
I am curious to know why you shun these things. Is it because it's popular, everyone's using it, and you don't want to get on the bandwagon? Or is there another reason entirely?
Not trolling... genuinely curious.
If we're talking about hot girls finally using a computer social networking tool, then yes, AIM was the first mainstream option. For the geeks, there was always IRC and other options.
I remember when AOL joined the Net:
- Before it was a community of mostly well behaved university students and teachers. Anybody coming into an existing online community (which at the time where mostly Usenet groups and mailing lists) quickly learned to be polite and RTFM/RTFF before asking stupid questions.
- Afterwards such was the influx of noobs, asshats and generally ignorant people that wouldn't be bothered to RTFM that most online communities ended up swamped and eventually destroyed by the suddenly much worse SnR due too many lazy people asking questings before reading the FAQ, spamming, misbehaviour and overall asshatery.
While the Net nowadays is way beyond our wildest dreams back then, the "Polite community" spirit was gone when AOL openned the floodgates.
I think some of the younger Slashdotters are getting AIM and AOL confused. AOL was for Grandma. But when they released the stand-alone AIM client, that is when Instant Messenger took off. That was the ONLY cool thing about AOL, the instant messaging. All other Internet functions that AOL provided could be accomplished through other ISPs. I ALWAYS tried to get people off of using AOL as their ISP, but AIM? There was nothing wrong with it, especially after programs like Trillian and GAIM came out, or the hacks that removed the advertising off the free AIM client. I was on ICQ and IRC too, but ICQ was cumbersome and was immediately abandoned when AIM debuted by myself and most everyone else I knew. And IRC was not something that everyday users used even back then.
To this day, almost everyone I know that was on AIM is still on AIM. Even through my college years when Facebook debuted, we all still used AIM. I still run Pidgin to keep in touch with my friends on AIM, GTalk, etc. While most kids going through grade school the last half decade or so have been using Facebook and GTalk the way my generation used AIM and E-mail, there are many who still choose to use AIM, especially if they have an older sibling who grew up using AIM.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
In those days, for me, it was ICQ and IRC.
I know people find this amazing... but SOMEHOW I've managed to continue doing that. I don't know how I manage with all this humanity-eroding technology, but somehow I still find the time to call my friends (or, heretically, create an event on Facebook or whatever) and meet for pizza and tell the same stupid stories again, reflect on the same memories and complain about work. It's all good. If anything, modern tech (you know, like phones and cars and roads) has made it EASIER to meet face-to-face.
Of course, with Facebook, IM and email I can also keep up with people I can't normally have a face-to-face conversation with. I can have those interactions at times when a phone call is too distracting. But hey, remember the days where, if I had a friend overseas, it would take months for my letters to arrive? Wasn't that great. I wish I could go back to being forced to carry on my relationships like that! Or how about when it was oppressively expensive to talk to people even in the next state over. That was excellent too. Man, I miss the old days. Remember when a two-day trip by horseback to the closest neighbor's ranch was our Facebook?
I could argue that telephones and, dare I say, letters have eroded the face-to-face, look-a-person-in-the-eye, give-a-firm-honest-all-American-hand-shake lifestyle you crave. In fact, language itself is responsible for this modern civilization that has crushed the very nature of humanity. We should be doing something IN REAL LIFE like grunting and hunting together while we make the women folk go gather nuts and berries or something. Remember when eating raw wild game together was our Facebook?
Way before AIM, there was Usenet and IRC. AIM was for the technically unproficient.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I got a lot of pussy from AIM. Just saying.
sudo mod parent up
Also drivel for gizmodo, which is saying quite a bit.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The main thing I recall about AOL and AIM are the hundreds and hundreds of floppies and later on cds that would appear in the mail or in every magazine on the news stand (even completely non computer oriented ones). We used to have contests to find innovative uses for our AOL disk stashes. The floppies made great coffee coasters (they made for a good and free supply of floppies too for the unimaginative, just format and store something REALLY useful on them) :) Later on the CDs made Christmas tree ornaments and they could be melted and warped into a number of interesting and light catching shapes. CD's also made great coffee coasters, even better than the floppies.
You mean to tell me that intelligent people used to actually USE the software to communicate? Really? ;)
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
{S:\con\con
No one liked it. Everyone other than AOL users preferred other services.
And more importantly, we were safer.
Like others have pointed out, this article is referring to when the general masses first moved to instant messaging and is not indicative of the /. crowd. Along those same lines, AIM wasn't really replaced by Facebook or any other computer based system. It really laid the ground work for the telecom cash cow of text messaging. Since not everyone was behind a keyboard/monitor at all times, texting offered a true "instant message." The old online instant messengers only got people used to the concept of conversing in short messages rather than calling them up on the phone.
You're right about ICQ, there's a reason AOL bought it for 400 million because AIM must have sucked. I remember getting ICQ after reading the mini blurb on the one page internet page Newsweek used to have. The 'net was still novel enough to make a small passing note using one whole page. I still chat on ICQ with pidgin to some friends, it's quick and encrypted with plugins. But.. I never used AIM. And I'm an American, I think the article author must have missed the boat about the early chat programs. Although I continue to chat with people on a MUD, this graphical fad will go away any day now.
We laughed at people who used AOL. What crack is this guy smoking?
Depends on your age and location. AIM was a must have for Middle school-to-College crowd in the mid-to-late 90's in the USA. If you are not in that demographic or outside the US, YMMV. As a teen in the late 90's, I can say that everyone I knew had an AIM account. Hell, our middle school even published a student directory with email and AIM contact info.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I knew that AOL had "screen names" because I read this phrase a lot when AOL "discovered" Usenet, and assumed it was AOL's equivalent of a UID. But I have never heard of AIM before this article. I guess that be being a Unix system engineer in the late 80s through to today, I missed out on that whole intertubes social thing.
Back in the (coughcough) 80s, I remember how exciting it was to dial into a FIDOnet BBS (back when phones actually had dials), post a message to an echomail group, and be able to get an answer within days! All for free, or at least subsidized by the dedicated people who had setup FIDO servers and modems. Everyone who was anyone had a FIDOnet handle. "Wow" I thought! This technology could make the USPS obsolete! Almost as kewl as the fledgling usenet, which required you to have access to that government-run internet thing.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Fuck your world and its "metric system".
I've used ICQ, MSN, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, but never AIM. AIM was never my Facebook, and Gizmodo doesn't know shit about fuck. Since when does Gawker Media post anything of value anyway ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Meh. I subscribed to AOL because my roomate wanted an easy way to get online. AOL had a huge bank of dial-in numbers, unlike a lot of other ISPs (you guys do remember that pre-broadband, we used telephones, connected with actual wires, and there were limited spots to dial in otherwise you got a busy signal). I didn't really care because I logged into AOL, minimized the client and went about my business as usual (IRC, mostly) and through flirting in the AOL chatrooms (real girls! Real... big.. girls) got dragged into AIM eventually. Once we got cable broadband, AOL got cancelled, but I continue to use my AIM screen name, although it's very rare I login to that account anymore.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Man, this thread has an above avg level of angry comments. "AIM was for idiots!" "The rest of the world used ICQ!" "True geeks used IRC". Ridiculous. OK, I concede AIM was NOT ubiquitous in the 90's, but early 00's it was definitely a common internet tool. The article states "a decade ago" often which means the author is mostly talking about early 00's.
I had an AIM buddy list with dozens of screennames. I had folders full of gif's to modify my icon on a weekly basis or whenever the mood struck. It was the communication of choice for my friends during college. It's how I knew when to go to lunch or dinner, how I scheduled parties, how I basically knew where everyone was and what they were doing. This was not some public liberal arts school, but a private engineering university. Hardly a bunch of non-technical nobodies. We got facebook sometime around '04 and things started to change, but you cannot say the article is not on point. AIM was used heavily, it was a social necessity, it did a good job for the time, and I don't think the NY based blog made any allusions to speaking globally.
The thing that always bugged me about AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, was that they were closed "networks" which divided the Internet. That is, you start with the Internet where, by default, everyone can reach everyone. I could send an email to anyone at any service provider/company/university/etc.
Then AOL comes along with AIM, and creates a proprietary system totally controlled by them, requiring me to register an AOL "screenname", instead of just using the standard username@host.tld identification system. They didn't at all try to work with MSN, Yahoo!, etc to make it so that anyone could talk to anyone.
So, we end up with like 6 different closed systems, and to talk to all your friends, you end up needing 6 different user "identities", one for each network. Sure, things like GAIM/Pidgin, and other multi-network chat clients made it possible to log into all the different networks simultaneously, but it was all ridiculously stupid.
SMS, despite the fact that it was stupidly expensive, at least had the advantage that it was based on an open standard, which allowed anyone on any carrier to send a message to anyone on any other carrier in the world.
I was happy when AIM, and the rest, basically died (I think I maybe used it one time each year in the last 5 years).
I still think online instant messaging can be useful (occasionally use Skype for that purpose, which also suffers from the same problem), but I'd really like to see the emergence of a system where all IM users can communicate (text, voice, video, and file transfer) to any other user on any service provider.
Flipside to Compuserve back then was GEnie. That, coupled with Prodigy which allowed me to dial into GEnie from my mostly-rural location allowed me and my wife to meet and chat with authors such as Mercedes Lackey and Tad Williams who were frequent posters on the SF/F Roundtable there. My wife even had lunch with Tad in Chicago and Holly Lisle wrote her into one of her books, then promptly killed her character off. Great fun.
I was sad to see it go. GEnie was a great, close-knit community which felt more like family than the massive groups on Facebook which tend to include your friend's friends, co-workers, acquaintances, mail carrier, dog groomer, etc.
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
Never used AIM much, never had an AOL account, and I was far from alone.
Vice President Al Gore once traveled back in time to create the Internet in order to fight Global Warming.
Ergo, we're right, and the rest of the world is stupid.
This article has a pretty decent point.. but as we all know Gawker is all about sensationalist writing and headlines, so take it with a grain of salt..
..slow.. and average youth in America, AIM was the messenger of choice.
All these posters are trying to act elitist and say they never used AIM..
Growing up, EVERYONE that I knew and EVERYONE in my school had AIM.. you can't pretend that it wasn't the cool thing to use as an American youth (12-16) back in the late 90s. Yes there were others; I also had MSN (for those out of the country that I talked to), ICQ (very briefly and only for a few people), and used IRC (still do).. but for the technically
That's kind of the point of the article - AIM was the first protocol (as others have pointed out: in the US) that had such widespread adoption that everyone had to have a handle on it in order to be connected, even if it wasn't your primary.
QSD and Lutzifer forever.
Anyone here remember the tymnet microwire account?
Yes, everyone knows AOL itself is a horrible service. The only people I know who've ever thought AOL was cool were either under 10 or geriatric at the time. But AIM... despite what it seems most people here are saying, not only have I used AIM pretty constantly for the past decade or more, and so have most of my friends - I still use it. And so do most of my friends. Many of whom are also computery-type people.
Nobody I knew cared about ICQ, ever. I've seen a couple people try to use msn messenger at various times, but the rest of us ignored them. Same with yahoo messenger, google talk, etc. Though Skype's caught on a bit, recently, for some reason. AIM is still by far the most common/popular IM service among the group of "everyone I've interacted with who uses any IM service", though.
You must have run in different circles. Only one person that I vaguely knew had one. AOL = Jerk was synonomous with my circle.