You must have been very young in the 90s because AOL dominated the late 90s. And it carried over into the early 00s with AIM even as people started to drop AOL

You must have been very young in the 90s because AOL dominated the late 90s. And it carried over into the early 00s with AIM even as people started to drop AOL as an ISP. MSN was more of mid-00s thing. The 90s were all AOL though. I knew people who used ICQ (it was definitely more of a nerd thing) and Yahoo Messenger too.