We had AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ and a few other also-rans. This was before the wave of insane megadeals.īy that point, we had a crowded IM market. In 1998, AOL, which had by then spun off AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) as a stand-alone app for non-AOL subscribers to use, bought Mirabilis for $287 million, plus another $120 million based on performance. Over time, ICQ added multi-user chat, SMS support and file transfers. Users were assigned a number rather than a user name like we have on Skype. Anyone could message you even if you were not on their friends list. It was a pretty basic app, and it lacked a lot of the security we now take for granted. It was all coming from a nifty little program I'd discovered called ICQ, which let me talk to friends in real time.Ĭreated by a group of Israeli college students who eventually formed the company Mirabilis to support development of the app, ICQ stood for 'I seek you' and was intended as a way for Windows users to communicate much in the same way Unix users could send real-time messages.

About 20 years ago, I started driving co-workers within listening distance crazy with constant chirps of 'Uh oh!' emanating from my laptop.

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