ICQ was simple and unencrypted, and every user was assigned a number - six digits at first, more later - for ease of operation. You could message anyone whose number you had, and you could gather them by fair means or foul, on IRC, BBS or AOL - or at school, of course, the way you’d exchange phone numbers. At first, contact lists and other info were even kept client-side, making it an early success of peer-to-peer as well as messaging. And a relatively open architecture meant it could be cloned and forked. Who can forget the little status icons, the sense of discovery and independence, the possibilities of a platform like this? It was popular among nerds of the day (source: was one), but this type of chat app quickly outgrew its humble beginnings.ĪOL Instant Messenger got its standalone in mid-1997, building on the concept and making it an easy transition from millions of AOL subscribers. Along with MSN Messenger, that pretty much blew the lid off the chat market, and prefigured today’s fractured ecosystem.

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