Oh, did I mix it up with MSN then, or maybe early Skype? Or did this possibly happen after the OSCAR migration?

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.

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 :)

Sounds like a very secure platform!

Oh it surely wasn't, but it also surely was fun!

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.

Then something like trillian to glue them all together.

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!

AOL had 'AOL Quick Buddy', a Java applet client and later AIM Express that used Adobe Flash.

I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM express.

Ah, I never used AIM directly. Maybe that would have worked with ICQ too, though?

In any case, Meebo worked using the (back then) advanced, exciting magic of AJAX :)

I think it did at some point, but I think it was quite a few years after ICQ was purchased before the infrastructure merged.

I used the icq web interface for a few years. It was 'ok' it was missing a lot of features but worked in a pinch.

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.

Adium! It really was a gem of an app. Much better than any other I’d used at the time (or that I have used since, actually).

Miranda was better.

Indeed. It was so nice to have a native app for work chat, since we could add Google Talk (XMPP) to Adium.

A pox on Slack.

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.

The obvious feature was that ICQ was bloated and MSN wasn't while also MSN coming preinstalled with Windows.

But... offline messages.

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.

Correct. ICQ was the first to the table with a store-and-forward message queue.

I suspect MSN/AIM/YM borrowed the idea within a few weeks or months.

245032701. The first number I ever memorized, and likely the only number eternally burned into my mind.

The special number from my childhood is: 007-373-5963