19 ms·
AIM will be discontinued today
- taurath 9y agoEnd of an era... I remember buying a helio ocean over an original iphone because it had support for AIM.
- freehunter 9y agoI had AIM-to-SMS set up so I could keep my chats going even on my flip phone, and then on Windows Mobile even if I didn't have data service. These days I can't even check Facebook unless I have LTE, if the phone says 4G I know I have no service. Man how things change.
- majewsky 9y agoLTE equals 4G.
- dingo_bat 9y agoNo what the parent says actually happens to me too. If the sign says 4g it means there is no data service. When it shows LTE or LTE+ then the data actually works.
- alehul 9y agoSecond this! 4G basically means 'expect nothing' for me.
- jermaustin1 9y agoLTE is an extension to 4G. That said, I'm pretty sure he meant 3G.
- jharger 9y agoSo I'm an iPhone user as well, and what he said is correct. The phone normally displays LTE when full LTE service is available. In my experience. when you're in a normal LTE area, the 4G display usually indicates a really bad signal, as in it can't establish a full LTE connection, so it's trying to fall back to an old protocol, and thus your data performance is really bad.
- freehunter 9y agoI meant 4G just like I said. If my iPhone shows LTE, I'm good. If it show 4G, I have nothing.
- heywire 9y agoIn the U.S., at least on AT&T, there is a difference between 4G and LTE. When my iPhone 6S+ switches the indicator from LTE to 4G, the data speeds are many times slower.
- hkmurakami 9y agoRIP. Browsing friends' creative AIM away messages were the precursor to that Snapchat status(?) feature I hear about.
- jrdnbwmn 9y agoAIM had a surprisingly large effect on all of today's social web: https://medium.com/@jrdnbwmn/the-legacy-of-aim-4321761ec9ff https://medium.com/@jrdnbwmn/the-legacy-of-aim-4321761ec9ff
- lode 9y agoAIM Status messages were the original inspiration for Twitter, then twttr. See : https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360 - twttr sketch by founder Jack Dorsey.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoIt's amazing (disheartening?) to see Twitter evolve from the website where you could tell your friends that you were eating dinner, to a website where the President of the USA makes real policy announcements.
- celim307 9y agowell, theres about the same amount of thought put into either tweet
- scarmig 9y agoUsually I spent at least 30 seconds deciding on where to go to dinner.
- thenewwazoo 9y agoI dunno, I used to spend a lot of time making my status messages really clever.
- 9y ago
- IntelMiner 9y agoGoodbye, AIM You're not dead. Just set to away
- tfmatt 9y agoList of product deaths of the 90s this year: 1. Hotmail.com 2. Half.com 3. AIM 4. ? Rest easy old friends
- shak77 9y agoHotmail died this year? How?
- staticelf 9y agoIt didn't, it became outlook.
- shak77 9y agoIt became Outlook like five years ago, unless I missed something.
- staticelf 9y agoYeah I don't know what that dude was talking about. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- rtx 9y agoFirst it became live.com
- nasredin 9y agoWhere does "MSN" and "Passport" fit in this orgy? Hotmail->Live->Outlook Hotmail - young rebellious teenager with 2 MB of storage Live - "experimenting" phase, "monopoly conviction? I do not recall!" Outlook - Older YUP, approaching middle age, quite cynical, but still might change, albeit with reluctance and complete lack of enthusiasm
- Macha 9y ago
- ChickeNES 9y agoIt's a shame they couldn't open source the original client and server software, would be interesting to preserve.
- nerdponx 9y agoI had the same thought. Now that it's dead, maybe releasing/leaking the source would be legally defensible as fair use in the name of historical preservation.
- exikyut 9y agoI wish the original AOL and CompuServe access clients and the servers could be opened as well.
- c22 9y agoThe source is pointless. You can build a much better chat system on modern technology in a weekend. The lost value is in their centralized servers with thousands of existing accounts. I'd always thought services like AIM would be replaced by more decentralized systems, but instead we have even more segmented walled garden chat apps where you don't even get to use your own client.
- yosamino 9y agoI will say this: XMPP is far from perfect. But I recently came back to it from a five year absence or so, and I must say, it's gotten really good. I set up a server with relatively little difficulty, and since in my circle, it's common to have multiple messengers on the phone anyhow, asking someone: hey, I want to use this other one, wasn't a big hassle. Conversations for Android is really good, and on iDevice ChatSecure works very well. Much better than what I expected. With filesharing and everthing. And then there's a bunch more that also work, but not of them at the same level of Quality. Marketshare is super-low of course, but I like that it's possible to use an open protocol.
- mxuribe 9y ago
- lelandgaunt 9y agoGoodbye AIM, you were the catalyst to my Information Security career. Good times.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- acjohnson55 9y agoTruly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM. Screen names are still part of the identity of some of my friends. For some folks that have already passed, our last conversations are on AIM. Don't know what else to say, but it definitely feels like a link to another era of my life is fading away. Nothing is permanent. RIP running man!
- forgueam 9y agoYou summed up my feelings perfectly. So many notable moments in my life played out over AIM conversations, especially discussions with my girlfriend (now wife) when we were geographically separated during our college years.
- pythonaut_16 9y agoYou just reminded my that my main screen name I use for everything was the one I originally came up with for AIM in like 16+ years ago.
- AccountCreated 9y ago> Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM. This could be read in more than one way. I agree it is sad.
- Frondo 9y agoNothing is permanent, exactly so. Our ability to slog around drives full of data lets us gloss over this fact, but when we're dead, are our kids gonna keep slogging around our drives? Nah. Better way to get permanence in your life is to do things that people will remember you for, if permanence is what you're after. Crowd-sourced in other people's memories.
- ImSkeptical 9y agoThat's why you need to keep it on some kind of cloud storage drive arranging an annuity or trust to keep paying the bills. Then, you have a script on a cloud server that posts on Craigslist once a year or month, hiring someone to duplicate your setup on a new cloud provider, opening a port for one of your existing nodes to connect to and verify, and also ask that person to modify the reproduction script of the clone, so that it will post on a Craigslist equivalent but not Craigslist. You'd also need some logic so that the rate you add clones is limited to the rate at which your fund to pay for the clones increases.
- exikyut 9y agoThe part that was IMHO completely un-thought-through: > Can I save my Buddy List? > Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List. -- > What happens to my data? > Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017. -- > Can I save my images and files? > Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017. > (Instructions to manually open each chat then scroll through looking for images and files)
- syntheticnature 9y agoI expect it was thought through, and the thought was "a few hundred thousand people use this service still, it's running under one employee's desk* and is completely unfunded, no effort above the minimum is to be expended." *Not sure if this was explicitly said or someone's joking claim during a past discussion of the shutdown.
- aimthrowaway5 9y agoThe final user numbers were way less than you would guess. It was a service built to handle tens of millions of users serving thousands. Scaling down that much is as labour intensive as scaling up. It's not just a launching all the services on a handful of VMs. The time had passed to make it a WhatsApp etc competitor.
- syntheticnature 9y agoDown to just thousands, not even tens of thousands? Wow. I knew about three others still using it (and I had it around for them), though only two of them messaged me with any regularity.
- ancarda 9y ago>Scaling down that much is as labour intensive as scaling up. Could you elaborate on this? I'm very interested to understand the challenges of downsizing a cloud service as I've never heard of that happening, and am surprised to hear it's difficult.
- nerdponx 9y agoUnfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List. Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017. Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017. Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all, without outright hacking the program (to the extent that hacking it is possible), to export your data, that you generated, and should by rights be yours to at the very least save (and not have to comb through potentially decades of chat history to export pictures and files one-by-one).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- da_chicken 9y agoI'm pretty sure you can do this with Pidgin, which is the only chat program I used from like 2004 to 2010 or so.
- syntheticnature 9y agoYes, I have my logs because I used Pidgin since before they offered chat history within AIM.
- orblivion 9y ago> Unfortunately This is quickly becoming my least favorite corporate buzzword.
- epicide 9y ago"We realize this is bad as well and we are on your side. It's just that the cosmos (fortune) has cast this upon us all. Woe is us! ... Unfortunately, you'll need to buy our other product to do this." Edit: a word.
- mcgrath_sh 9y agoI actually took screenshots of my buddy list for just this reason. I will eventually put it into a text document. Seeing all my friends’ old screen names brought back so many memories. Was well worth the ~15 minutes it took me.
- paulie_a 9y agoI am one of the dozens of daily users that will be effected
- jamix 9y ago> Why is AIM shutting down? > We know there are so many loyal fans who have used AIM for decades; and we loved working and building the first chat app of its kind since 1997. Our focus will always be on providing the kind of innovative experiences consumers want. We’re more excited than ever to focus on building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products. Corporate BS-speak at its best. Three sentences and 0% answering the question.
- 0xJRS 9y agoSpeaking a lot and saying nothing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- paulryanrogers 9y ago"...first chat app of its kind since 1997" Wasn't ICQ the same kind of chat app?
- scott_s 9y agoNot the same kind, though the difference was subtle, and maybe not an important distinction to most people. In ICQ, you sent discrete messages back and forth. You could (I believe) look at the last message while replying, but you didn't have a chat history integrated into the same window where you replied. I used both ICQ and AIM in the '90s and early 2000s, even talking to the same people, and the interactions felt very different. ICQ felt like it was between email and AIM in the communication spectrum: obviously interactive and real-time, but each person tended to say more in each message. AIM's style encouraged more call-response conversations. I point this out because I think it's an interesting case of user-interface design influencing use, even though on the surface they're both "chat apps."
- digi_owl 9y agoI seem to recall that the ICQ window had a multiple modes. One of them was individual messages, but another allowed each party to see what the other was typing in real time. Also, if one want to talk about chat histories one should not forget about IRC.
- dwighttk 9y agoYou see what happens when you repeal title II!?!!
- dwighttk 9y agotoo soon?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tombert 9y agoWhile I completely understand why this is being done, it feels bizarre to me. Since I was 11 years old, AIM was one of those universal constants to me, not radically different than death or taxes in my mind. I will really miss the fad of `xXxXmYcOoLsCrEeNaMexXx`, and the cheesy-yet-charming profiles and away messages. AIM, I sollute you farewell. Without you, I wouldn't have as many good memories of my teens, and I wouldn't have the nickname "tombert"
- vollmond 9y agoAway messages... haven't thought about those in years. Back when you might occasionally find yourself away from any internet connected devices. Truly the 00s were a strange time.
- ghaff 9y agoI don't generally bother with away messages but I, for one, am routinely away from Internet devices for hours and even days at a time. Not everyone is plugged in 24/7.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rb808 9y agobrb
- pcunite 9y agoI had one of the coolest experiences with AOL Instant Messenger. I think it was 1998 ... my dad and I could communicate over this new and virtual wave of the future. I could send him a short thought, and like magic, his thoughts would appear back on my screen accompanied by a cool sound. Even though he was all the way across town, I felt very close to my dad that day.
- jakebasile 9y agoI remember a similar experience when my dad and I tried it out back in the day. We weren't even that far apart but I remember as a 10-12 year old (can't remember exact time) asking him to use it to talk to me from the next room over. I wish I had kept those AIM and other services' messages since they're mostly lost to me due to either the service shutting down, lost passwords, or my own mistake of deleting them around the time he died - in my grief I thought I'd never want to see them again. It was one of the things that got me into computers. Although it doesn't directly affect my day to day as I no longer use AIM, it was the first place I registered my screen name that I still use everywhere. Yes, my screen name is just my name, but it has significance to me all the same.
- decasteve 9y agoI used AIM entirely through Trillian and that’s what I associate it with. I remember having it alongside ICQ, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger, all running under Trillian. It gives me a “Those were the days...” moment.
- Cknight70 9y agoSame here! I'm really sad they never added anymore chat protocols, and now most of the ones I used are obsolete or don't work. I stopped when all my friends switched from Skype (which I used Trillian for) to Telegram, but I missed how compact Trillian was.
- oblio 9y agoI get the impression that Pidgin, Trillian and the other one I can't really remember just gave up at some point. I'm using Pidgin, mostly out of nostalgia, but the default configuration basically can't connect to any mainstream messenger these days (Facebook, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Skype or Viber). Plus the UI is so dated, especially regarding emojis. Before anyone asks, it's in C and I'm nowhere competent (or interested enough in gaining the required competency) to contribute. With stuff like Pidgin you notice what mindshare really means. A "crappy" Electron based app is nicer to use than the "native" one. In the end, it's all about coders polishing code. No hours put in, no end result coming out.
- kuschku 9y ago> I get the impression that Pidgin, Trillian and the other one I can't really just gave up at some point. > I'm using Pidgin, mostly out of nostalgia, but the default configuration basically can't connect to any mainstream messenger these days (Facebook, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Skype or Viber). Plus the UI is so dated, especially regarding emojis. Pidgin supports Telegram and Facebook. Well, it did support Facebook, Facebook is constantly changing their API to prevent that. Someone also wrote a WhatsApp backend. WhatsApp forced GitHub to take down the code, and sued the dev. In this modern world, open chat software is impossible.
- alien2003 9y agoRIP
- bonniemuffin 9y agoI just tried to sign in via Adium and got "Received unexpected response from https://api.screenname.aol.com/auth/clientLogin https://api.screenname.aol.com/auth/clientLogin: Invalid DevId" so I guess it's gone.
- jetti 9y agoWhile I haven't used AIM in ages, I remember it fondly. There was a cool addon/hack for AIM that gave it more functionality such as combining all chats into one window and the ability to adjust the windows so that you could see through them. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? If you do, do you remember the name of the addon/hack?
- goric 9y agoDeadAIM [1] was one such hack. I remember it also provided the ability to manually change your status to anything, including invisible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeadAIM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeadAIM
- jetti 9y agoThat's exactly what I was looking for, thanks! I remember that hack fondly. It made things so much easier.
- scottcorgan 9y agosk8naked19
- smaili 9y agoRIP On a side note, it would have been great if rather than discontinue AIM, they open sourced it and put it in the hands of the community. It feels somewhat wasteful to close the doors on such an iconic piece of software.
- ghaff 9y agoIt takes effort (ie $$) to open source software including making sure it doesn’t include libraries or other code licensed from third parties.
- booleandilemma 9y agoI remember when my friend introduced me to AIM (and “instant messaging”) in the 90s. “It’s like email, but faster”
- Cknight70 9y agoSomething I'll miss about AIM and older chat clients is how compact they were. Most of these newer chat programs seem to assume you're going to have their application take up the entire screen.
- syntheticnature 9y agoGood point! Perhaps it's a holdover from smartphone chat apps, most of which were designed full-screen.
- 0x445442 9y agoOne thing I hate about most IM clients is the buddy/friend/roster list runs in a separate window from actual chat sessions. I much prefer the one window paradigm of IRC.
- jakebasile 9y agoFunny, I'm the exact opposite. Most of the chat programs I use (or have used) use the combined approach. Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and so on all have the "buddy list" permanently attached to the conversation window such that you can only see a single conversation at a time. I prefer the MDI of yore since I can have multiple conversations open at once (on desktop, I realize this isn't feasible on mobile).
- ReverseCold 9y agoWhat chat apps use separate windows? The only one I can think of is Steam.
- Cknight70 9y agoPretty much every older chat program used this at some point including Google chat, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Pidgin, and even Skype.
- cortesoft 9y agoThey need all that room for ads.
- cat199 9y agomeanwhile slack grows and requires a much heavier desktop client, and people use fb chat like wildfire clearly the issue is product mismanagement rather than cultural shifts away from 'this type of service'
- eric_h 9y agoI don't think it was mismanagement - chat followed where people stored their identities online. One's online identity was for many years their aol screen name - now, for many, it's facebook.
- jdlyga 9y agoI tried to login with several of my old accounts months ago, but they blocked the reset password option.
- AccountCreated 9y agotear
- AccountCreated 9y agoTear
- kstrauser 9y agoIn 1998, I built a computer (her first) for my girlfriend so that she and I could chat while I was at work. We've been married 18 years now. Thanks for the memories, AIM!
- DarronWyke 9y agoI'm in a similar boat. I met my wife on a website with a mutual game interest, and we started chatting on AIM. Come to find out she's not too far from where I lived and I started visiting her once a month. Now we're married.
- bobsgame 9y agoF
- majortennis 9y agogood i've been locked out of my account since 2002 anyway. my poor neopets are starving
- strictnein 9y agoWhen AOL bought ICQ, there was a lot of concern that they were cornering the IM market. And now AIM is dead.
- acheron 9y agoAnd on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is AOL Time Warner, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Nothing beside remains. Seriously though, it is amazing to look back on the utter dominance of AOL in the late 90s-early 00s, and it’s almost complete disappearance shortly afterward.
- danschumann 9y agoWhen I started using aim, my password was 4 characters, and was a dictionary word, and I never got hacked. I spent days chatting with friends, chasing girls. I feel sad.
- danschumann 9y agoBy the way it was "took" I thought that's how you spelled tukee (the exotic bird ). Hopefully no one can use this password against me.. Not sure if I ever changed it!
- jwilk 9y agoI wasn't sure what bird is that, so I googled for "tukee bird". Google says "Did you mean: turkey bird", but it shows me pictures of toucans. I'm confused.
- danschumann 9y agoLol, apparently I still can't spell it. Is that just a toucan? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixec55yXhKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixec55yXhKs
- jedberg 9y agoGoodbye. :( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0 Since everyone is sharing their AIM memories: When I was in college (1995-1998), AIM was the #1 way to flirt with people. Today the kids worry about whether they got a like or not. Back then, you'd sit and stare at your buddy list waiting for that person you liked to come online so you could say something witty, and then stew with worry if they didn't respond but remained online.
- ouid 9y agoI was under the impression that in 1995-1998, flirting irl was still number 1.
- jedberg 9y agoMaybe in some places for some people, but for us Berkeley nerds it was definetly online. Of course you had to flirt in person to get their screen name.
- kenjackson 9y agoYou couldn’t scale like you did with AIM.
- DarronWyke 9y ago>Back then, you'd sit and stare at your buddy list waiting for that person you liked to come online so you could say something witty, and then stew with worry if they didn't respond but remained online. Or you'd get a friend/another account to IM them to see if they'd really blocked you or not.
- jedberg 9y agoYes! You had your alt account to check for blocks. I forgot about that.
- wakkaflokka 9y agoI wish I could be omniscient for a few minutes just to know what happened to all the people I've A/S/L'd during childhood. Or maybe I don't want to know - I imagine some of them probably died from old age.
- segmondy 9y agoYou will be surprised how many died young. :-(
- orthecreedence 9y agoChecking in! I was a huge AIM user. I've had the same screenname since I was 12. Now the only two left in my circle who use it are me and my wife. I'm really nostalgic about AIM. I met a lot of really cool people on there, but its time is definitely passed. Luckily having used Pidgin for years will make the transition for gchat or something similar pretty seamless. Still sad, though.
- royalghost 9y agoRemembers 90's when I would hooked on AIM to chat and make friends....make me cry
- phyzome 9y agoAs of yesterday, they were sending an announcement every 5 minutes about the impending shutdown. Now when you try to connect, they send the announcement and then disconnect you. I guess they want to see 0 traffic before they pull the plug.
- greg5green 9y agoAdium just got disconnected about 1:20am EST and shows an error when trying to connect. Were you using the official client?
- knodi 9y agoA/S/L?
- metisploit 9y agoToying with the idea of building "SAIM", an AIM clone (As close as we can without getting sued by AOL). Anyone want to team up?
- delecti 9y agoI suspect that if AOL still cares about their AIM trademark, "SAIM" would be too close. Pidgin was originally called "GAIM". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu...
- justin_ 9y agoA few months ago I was playing around windows 98 in VM for fun. I installed an old version of Netscape that had AIM integration built right in. It still worked perfectly, and I even was able to talk to a few high school buddies. RIP
- zeep 9y agoThat's a last minute warning... I never used AIM... is ICQ still being used...
- syntheticnature 9y agoThey posted about it over a month ago (perhaps up to three), and if you used it you were getting regular pings about its upcoming demise. As for ICQ, last I knew a Russian company bought it from AOL and it is still operational.
- spike021 9y agoThe end of an era.
- niftich 9y agoI felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of doors suddenly slammed shut, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
- 3chelon 9y agoI nearly crapped myself. I thought it meant the London AIM stock market (bang go my investments!).
- DarronWyke 9y agoHas it already been pulled? I was hoping to do something tonight before it was shut down.
- bobsgame 9y agoPress F to Pay Respects
- tunesmith 9y agoOne thing I'll miss about AIM is that it's a communication modality that doesn't exist right now. It was everywhere, and on MacOS it was integrated into the OS. For most people I knew, they had it set to join when they got on the computer. So it meant that you knew when your friends were at the computer, and you knew when you could have long "in the background" conversations with your friends. It was just a different level of intimacy - I had so many longer and interesting, sometimes deep conversations through AIM (or through iMessage hooked up with AIM). On a Mac at least, that's unlike anything we have now with facebook and Messenger.app. Now when you look at your buddy list, you have no idea whether they're at their computer or if they're busy or running around with their phone. I try to get my friends to join a Slack room with me, but we don't always have it started, or we're in a different Slack room. At any rate there just isn't that critical mass where you know someone is online and chattable.
- FreakyT 9y agoI completely agree! Today, as far as I know, only Facebook Messenger comes even close to supporting it. Specifically, Messenger can show you an "online now" tab, indicating who is currently at least using Messenger or Facebook, and can even show you "Active now" versus "Active 30m ago".
- Jarwain 9y agoI find Discord to fill this space in a slightly more effective way, although I don't believe they differentiate from mobile vs. computer use quite yet. However, I find a majority of my friends (and I personally) use discord mainly on desktop. I don't even have discord on my phone.
- esotericsean 9y agoI use Discord, but I only have it installed on my phone. More convenient that way.
- binaryblitz 9y agoDo you actually use it for gaming?
- veridies 9y agoI still used AIM up until today. My friends and I just switched over to a private XMPP server, and we've been using Pidgin/Adium anyway, so it's not a huge change. AIM has been extremely reliable, I've been able to use it on every platform I've ever owned (usually with free software), and it's easy to end-to-end encrypt messages. My friends and I just never saw a reason to move away from AIM. Everyone just decided to switch to things that were newer for novelty's sake, and transferred their friendships and conversations into non-private, non-free systems. Even Google, which at first used an open protocol, moved to a siloed system while adding nothing of much value (as evidenced by Google's low share of the messaging market). And now to talk to people I have to switch between Google, Skype, Apple, and Facebook, all of whom inter-compatible systems, all of whom reneged on their promises, and none of whom offer me any value whatsoever. This is not a happy day for me.
- esotericsean 9y agoYou'll still be able to use AIM if you setup a private server? I need to look into this.
- nyolfen 9y agono, xmpp is not aim
- veridies 9y agoAs nyolfen mentioned, XMPP is just a competing, decentralized protocol for AIM-like chat. It has a similar feature set and works with most third-party AIM clients.
- aninteger 9y agoIf you ever get around to making a private OSCAR based server and publish the code somewhere please let us know.
- yason 9y agoIt's amazing how temporary things are. I never used AIM much but if I had I would have a lot of history in my life with a particular service and now they would pull the plug. Ditto with Facebook these days. Or hosted software like Google Reader. In contrast, I still have most what I grew up with. Disk images of my old computers, binaries of games and applications, fully usable in emulators. There's IRC -- while the networks I used then have died a long time ago IRC probably never dies. I still use IRC on some networks and interface some other chat services by using a proxy frontend that you can connect with an IRC client. But most importantly, I can launch early computer games from my childhood. It's like having your old toys on a shelf at your parent's house. Not only I can still try out the game I never could finish (and observe that I still can't finish it because games in the 80's were often both stupid and ridiculously hard), but I can put my kids at the controls and tell them this is what their parent used to play at the same age. It's not just history and culture but an origin. This is where I came from. For a human being that is a very concrete, if not tangible, thing, and of value in itself. Now think that you can't fire up Instagram or Facebook or even Angry Birds in 2035 and tell someone hey this is how we shared pictures, messaged, and gamed back in the 10's.
- matt_kantor 9y agoI share your sentiments but I don't think AIM is an example of this. I haven't used AIM in 8+ years but there was an easy-to-find checkbox in the official client (and unofficial ones too) to save all history as simple text files on disk. I'm pretty sure I still have records of AIM conversations from back in ~1999 in my backups. Actually the linked article mentions this. Look for "Can I view and save my chat history?". It sounds like the checkbox I mentioned is enabled by default.
- stefantheard 9y agoWell this was the actual only way of contacting one person I knew back from my counterstrike days. CSMario who invented surf maps in counterstrike if you're out there, drop me a line!
- sosilkj 9y agoAnyone else having troulbe connecting to ICQ?
- TaylorGood 9y agoRolecall for your former screen name. Mine was: Tdogg5388 Shows what age I was during peak of AIM.
- avonmach 9y agoR.I.P.