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 :)
Before we even had “wi-fi!”
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!)
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.
Back then, it felt like a parallel world; now it's more like an overlay on this one.
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"?
What gave you the idea that I’m getting unwanted notifications or that I am in some other way helpless about them?
Same for emails, etc. communication felt a lot more “thought out” in a sense - you would have limited time to send or receive information.
how times have changed!
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.
What am I missing?
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.
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.
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).
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.
The vast majority of my data usage now, on unlimited, comes from watching YouTube.
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’d be reachable anywhere in the house, as the landline could start ringing with friends asking to play.
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.
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 vividly remember being amazed by offline delivery in Jabber, so at least one of ICQ or MSN must have not had it for me to even notice.
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)
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!
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.
I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM express.
In any case, Meebo worked using the (back then) advanced, exciting magic of AJAX :)
A pox on Slack.
We were on dialup back then. You could only send messages with MSN if the other person was also using the household landline at the same time.
Yeah Microsoft did not exactly play fair back then. Even Apple today is not as anti competitive as Microsoft was.
Also, I don't recall ICQ being bloated. Maybe it was later on.
I suspect MSN/AIM/YM borrowed the idea within a few weeks or months.
My next phone was a Nokia 5800, one of the last Symbian ones.
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!
I started to implement the number field sieve to demonstrate this, but got lost in the weeds and moved on to other stuff.
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
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.
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 :(
You served me well 177024717
- 114003124
Is anyone aware of maintained forks or a revival effort?
Or at least it will die like USENET died: becoming only of interest to spammers and pornographers.
I can't remember the last time I even thought about ICQ, much less had a client installed. But damn, end of an era
I still remember it but not the pass
I can remember an unused IM account from a lifetime ago but not a single ffmpeg flag.
The brain remembers what it wants to remember.
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.
I wonder if you had some ASCII characters, or those old custom-font-and-special-characters texts we used to use?
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.
The early Internet was an amazing place.
Had it for many years then someone “hacked it” and took it. That was the end of it for me.
it's crazy I can still remember this despite not having used it for maybe ...25 years?
That feeling is mutual.
Just logged in, there's nothing left.
I remember being so annoyed I hadn't signed up a few weeks earlier and gotten a 5-digit instead.
Just managed to login. Had one person on my contact list and he is dead...
Still remembered, always remembered
And I'm still sad 10 minutes later about the relationships that faded when we switched platforms.
Same, it caught on like wildfire and everyone in my class, program and perhaps everyone with a computer in school used it. Network effect in action
This is from a time where you had to find an Ethernet drop to plug your laptop in to be available on ICQ
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.
edit: Found a video of an old client working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_pYWRfeYKs
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
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.
Another reminder of how things change over time.