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Explain how there was "kind of" instant messengers. AIM had already been out for years at that point
by vegnus 1mo ago
Explain how there was "kind of" instant messengers. AIM had already been out for years at that point
- kees99 1mo agoBy year 2000, there were "proprietary" messengers aplenty - yahoo, aim, icq, qq, and a bunch more. All of which were simple enough to reverse engineer, so Linux user could just install Gaim (later renamed Pidgin) and connect to most any of those. What's more, there were already two open standards: SIP/SIMPLE, and newer XMPP.
- rw_grim 1mo agoI assure you stuff like OSCAR (the protocol for AIM and ICQ) is anything but simple and was a huge effort by many people to reverse engineer.