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This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address). Bu
by jedberg 2y ago
This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address).
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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- weinzierl 2y agoSame for me but the day I will really cry a little will be when mIRC dies. It was my introduction to instant effortless free worldwide communication. Of course I haven't used it for decades but it calms me that it is still very alive.
- jan_Sate 2y agoUnlike ICQ, mIRC is just an IRC client and even if it dies, the IRC networks would remain accessible using other IRC clients. That said it'd be a pity if mIRC dies.
- RankingMember 2y agoI'd hope Khaled would open source it if he decides to give it up
- freedomben 2y agoThis is starting to feel even more important now that HexChat is over.[1] Is anyone aware of maintained forks or a revival effort? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39326630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39326630
- okasaki 2y agoIRC is very simple. I used to connect with telnet if a client wasn't available.
- nick238 2y agoIsn't mIRC just a client for IRC (a standard), but ICQ is centralized? Or are there some "mIRC"-branded servers out there that run popular IRC channels?
- aleksandrm 2y agoCorrect, mIRC is just one of many clients for an IRC protocol.
- weinzierl 2y agoYes, yes, just a client, but for me it was the first interface to whole new world, so I will never forget it.
- edm0nd 2y agoslaps you with a trout
- alluro2 2y agoI genuinely LOLed, thanks for that! :) What a flashback.
- userbinator 2y agoI was reminded of that when analysing the Skype (now Teams) protocol and found that one of the domains it uses was trouter.io.
- Freedom2 2y agomIRC has the same chance of dying as Irssi. As in none.
- kirenida 2y agoI remember choosing irrsi over bitchx because the latter was "too complicated" for me at the time.
- bitwize 2y agoIRC will never die. I met my wife on IRC ~25 years ago, it'll still be here when we're old. Or at least it will die like USENET died: becoming only of interest to spammers and pornographers.
- cultavix 2y agohaha... this sounds so familiar ;)
- codegeek 2y agoI remember the music/sound when ICQ used to load up. The logo was brilliant. Nostalgia. Circa 1999-2001 when I used it heavily. Best part though: finding strangers and becoming online friends with many of them (without worrying about scams etc).
- Ma8ee 2y agoI certainly ran into scammers on ICQ.
- tempestn 2y agoYeah, the random chats were definitely the highlight. I recall a level of discourse considerably higher than what you commonly find on eg. Omegle now (or 5 years ago or whenever I last used it, anyway).
- I_am_uncreative 2y agoWell, Omegle doesn't exist anymore, so that's a true statement anyhow.
- dadver 2y agoI don't know if it's nostalgia or silliness, but I've at various times reused the ICQ uh-oh audio as irssi hilight/putty audio bell sound, SMS signal and Discord voice channel join sound over the years. Usually I find it entertaining the first two or three times and then it acts as a very large stressor.
- carlosjobim 2y ago[flagged]
- jedberg 2y agoMy wife and I just had a whole conversation about it actually. Amusingly she was not one of the romantic relationships I maintained on ICQ because we were always with each other in person. But both of us had long lasting friendships on ICQ, some of which moved to other platforms, some of which did not. And I'm still sad 10 minutes later about the relationships that faded when we switched platforms.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoLonging is as real as hunger.
- carlosjobim 2y agoI highly doubt that anybody is going to have a hard time sleeping for many nights because of the news of ICQ shutting down.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI think you’re mixing up “sad” with “depression”.
- 0xDEADFED5 2y agojust logged in for the first time in 20 years. actually remembered my ICQ number and password! the contact list didn't seem to survive though
- lxgr 2y agoI have similar sentimental memories of ICQ. 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 :) [1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
- semi 2y ago>(not sure if it was part of the "chat wars" [1] too). 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
- jmbwell 2y agoBeing reachable only from a PC at home… man. Now that I miss. The whole lifestyle of having a clear distinction between being at the computer and not. Status messages for a time when “away” was a state of being you ever were. Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you. Simpler times for sure. Before we even had “wi-fi!”
- 101008 2y agoI started writing an essay about this topic. I am one of those nostalgics by the old internet. I thought it was the aesthetic (geocities, etc), but after giving it a lot of thought, that wasn't. It was that your life (all of us) was "offline by default". 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!)
- larodi 2y ago4125222 I still remember it but not the pass
- xcv123 2y agoSame here. Haven't logged in for 20 years but I remembered the number.
- verst 2y ago219431446 was me :D. No idea why I still remember that.
- r2_pilot 2y ago16575923
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- silisili 2y ago22861316 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.
- kinow 2y agoInteresting, I managed to open the other IDs I found here, but yours gives me a very broken web page: https://icq.im/22861316/en https://icq.im/22861316/en I wonder if you had some ASCII characters, or those old custom-font-and-special-characters texts we used to use?
- silisili 2y agoI'm not gonna lie, I have absolutely no idea. That's bizarre. What would normally show there?
- agumonkey 2y agoHard to realise how cultural waves come and go. Humbling
- septune 2y ago5 digits ICQ number is a great achievement
- nogridbag 2y agoI just logged in for the first time in over 25 years a few weeks ago. I found https://web.icq.com/ https://web.icq.com/ which does not require an email address: only the ID and password. And back then I used a single password for everything. 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.
- aembleton 2y agoI tried messaging someone who seemed to be online and got a system reply telling me that my account had been compromised which is entirely possible as 20 years ago I used that same password elsewhere.
- amlib 2y agoThanks, I had no idea what my password was but trying one of the old ones I constantly used back in the day worked :) 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
- fragmede 2y agoI logged in (how the hell did I remember the ID and password‽) but all my contacts except 1 that I don't remember are gone.
- egeozcan 2y agoI had exactly the same experience! Just one contact is there, I had at least a hundred.
- Huffers2 2y agoFor at least the last fifteen years I've believed my ICQ account was lost forever, however seeing your post now I decided one last time to try logging in by guessing the password. And it worked!! I can see my old friends list! What a weirdly uplifting feeling! - 114003124
- freediver 2y agoSix digit UIN holder, last used 2009.
- wernercd 2y agoI have a 7 digit number but I remember it still after all these years lol Was able to login still.
- robohydrate 2y ago58843787 Managed to remember it along with my password from 20+ years ago and it allowed me to login! Really amazing actually it's been around this long.
- geek_at 2y agosame! 97910162 for some reason I even printed it out with a lable maker and put it on my safe.. it's not the password but might be a good diversion
- Udo 2y ago113585 - probably the very last time I can feel good about this number! I can't remember the last time I even thought about ICQ, much less had a client installed. But damn, end of an era
- xnx 2y ago591007
- yatz 2y agoOh my, I did not know it still existed. My very first romantic connection was made on ICQ and then MSN Messenger. Can't believe how fast time flies!
- adamomada 2y ago> It was my main method of electronic communication in college 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
- torpid 2y agoI wonder how many people went to icq.com and first provided their phone number thinking it was mandatory, then realized there was a "Login with password link", then went back, put in their ICQ UIN, and tried every last password they've used for the past 20 years before finding the one that worked? Neat trick, Russia! 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.
- kazmer_ak 2y agoMan, that's how I felt about MSN Messenger and XFire and Google Talk...
- aalaap 2y ago3294067
- derwiki 2y agoYou got me! 3660836
- egeozcan 2y agoI had a 6 digit one, then lost it, then got 49053668. I've forgotten many passwords but never this. I actually could login to the web app, using the oldest password I used that I can remember, but it doesn't show any old contacts except one. Oh well. So long and thanks for all the <s>fish!</s> great moments! edit: Found a video of an old client working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_pYWRfeYKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_pYWRfeYKs
- zero_bias 2y ago3048666 Pretty long but with cool number in it. I thought I forgot a password but looks like my account was deleted, although it still has funny description typical for a young boy. Friendship started and ended entirely in icq, relationship, whole other things. It was the era for me for sure 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
- newsclues 2y agoAs someone with a similarly low icq number but I lost the authentication details, I’m happy it’s gone and I don’t need to worry that I can’t remember my password anymore