RIP AIM

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RIP AIM

Postby Malfeasinator » Fri Dec 15, 2017 9:03 pm

AOL Instant Messenger is dead.

I feel kind of weird about that.

I had a lot of good memories. I haven't used it since like 2009, though. I couldn't have remembered my old password to save my soul.

Everything I've ever said on there is deleted, which, thinking about it now, is probably a good thing, because some of it would be incriminating. *edit: I was going to expand upon this, but on further reflection, I won't.

Somehow ICQ is still around in some form, and they were bought by AOL so... I'm not sure how that works.

Maybe I'll reinstall it.

edit 2: I can't remember my old ICQ number anymore. I remember the password! (the name of a girl I strongly liked - in the year 2000). It was only 8 digits. I know the first digit for sure. Maybe I can brute force it.
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Re: RIP AIM

Postby NathanLoiselle » Fri Dec 15, 2017 11:03 pm

Gosh. I haven't used AIM or ICQ since the year 2000.

*hears in the background Conan O'Brien singing "In The Year 2000"*
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Re: RIP AIM

Postby cmsellers » Fri Dec 15, 2017 11:26 pm

I've never used any instant messaging client. Talking with people online would have detracted from my "sit alone in my room reading" time. Apparently I was even more anti-social back then.
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Re: RIP AIM

Postby Malfeasinator » Sat Dec 16, 2017 12:48 am

cmsellers wrote:I've never used any instant messaging client. Talking with people online would have detracted from my "sit alone in my room reading" time. Apparently I was even more anti-social back then.


I was starved for knowledge in those days.

I didn't get online until I was 17 and it was dial up.

Talking to people was how I learned about a lot of things.

I got a mix CD from a girl from Australia and I got to listen to bands I'd never heard of before then, like Frenzal Rhomb. It was really impressive to me, because CD burning speeds were super slow back then, so she really put a lot of time into it.



I actually talked to people from all over the world on the phone, but tried to limit that because long distance charges were a bitch back then. It was funny talking to people from Australia. *edit: because of time zone differences, it being day in one place and night in the other, not because of the accent, although one Australian girl did say I had a "sleazy" American accent, whatever that means... One guy said after we talked that he started having dreams where I showed up in Melbourne and seemed to know my way around better than he did.

I had post cards from Ireland. I had a handmade birthday card with drawings and like, five bucks, from someone I talked to on ICQ. I used to tweak the sound settings on ICQ, and then the sound schemes of Windows itself, with stuff from Metal Gear Solid or Duke Nukem or Mortal Kombat.

It was a magical time in my life.

I learned about video game emulation, and some minor hacking tricks, from some people in California. I've had people shut my computer down while I was talking to them. That freaked me out the first few times; it was also extremely frustrating. Having to log back on took forever. I learned about video game remix music, and from there, I learned that, you know, I really do like different genres, and not because they're related to some game that I grew up on, but I actually liked the way they sounded, and that... that was okay.

I'd say talking to people on those things really expanded my world view. My views on a lot of things, politics, music, social issues, really changed, as I'd had arguments and philosophical debates at a very kind of impressionable age in my life.

I wish I could have stayed in touch with everybody, but life goes on, or sometimes it doesn't, and everybody goes their separate ways sooner or later.

I remember Windows 95 having Sound Recorder, and I'd find like these sample .wav files of pop culture stuff and I'd try to mash stock sound effects and so on into this long sound file and make audio battle scenes between different characters and I'd send them to people. It'd take forever, because some of them were upwards of 5 megabytes. But people thought they were cool. I learned to make pauses in breathing so the characters didn't sound like they were talking over each other. They got more complex over time. I'd included stuff like a wolf howling in the background or some other kind of ambient noise, and then it would be back to gunshots and glass breaking and so on. I had fun with it, but I only really did it because other people thought it was cool. There was a lot of bullshit *edit - that you could find online, like AOL had directories of free files like Ash from Evil Dead kills Barney and they were really sloppily done, with no breaks for time to formulate though, just boom, shit happens, response, file over. I wanted to do stuff that didn't suck.

I used to talk to a guy who was in the Marines, and he was a Mormon, and he was about to leave the Marines at the end of his contract to go on his mission that I learned Mormon dudes had to do, and he was cool to talk to, gave a me a lot of advice, especially since I was at an age when I was thinking about joining the military, and he was like the voice of reason. He didn't talk me out of it, he just told me the truth of things, how they really were, and let me make up my mind. I talked to him years later and he had met a nice girl and got married, and he seemed happy, and I was like yeah, okay, I don't see anything wrong with that.

There were dark sides, too, of course. I got threatened when conversations got too real. I got shown awful things like goatse, which, if you don't know what it is, please for the love of your own sanity do not look it up, and worse, which, if you've seen goatse and you're wondering what worse is, just know that it exists and you should have learned your lesson the first time I told you not to look it up.

I also got catfished before there was even a popular term for what that was. Thankfully I had one good friend in real life who kind of snapped me out of it.

Stuff like those chat programs really filled a hole in my life when I needed them. I guess Facebook is supposed to fill the hole now, but it's just not the same.
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Re: RIP AIM

Postby jbobsully11 » Sat Dec 16, 2017 12:56 am

I regularly talked to about 2-3 people on it in high school, slightly fewer than the number of people I regularly talked to offline in school. I stopped whenever it was that they forced users to upgrade to 6.0, because I didn’t like the new layout.
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Re: RIP AIM

Postby LunarTeaHouse » Sat Dec 16, 2017 7:02 am

I'm still best friends with a dude I met on an AIM music chatroom in 2003. Hah. I visited him and his family in NYC for the first time in 2008 and then he came out here and now we see each other every few years. He and his friends got me into death metal and the whole dark subculture, inspired me to play guitar and everything. I don't know who I would be if I hadn't met him.

You know when you're 13 and you meet someone and you just think they're the coolest person in the world and you want to be just like them? That was how I felt about him and his cool NYC friends, heh. To a small, conservative town girl, they were like gods to me. Pretty funny looking back on it now. Oh, AIM.
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Re: RIP AIM

Postby Malfeasinator » Sat Dec 16, 2017 8:58 pm

jbobsully11 wrote:I regularly talked to about 2-3 people on it in high school, slightly fewer than the number of people I regularly talked to offline in school. I stopped whenever it was that they forced users to upgrade to 6.0, because I didn’t like the new layout.


Ha, 6.0.

You mean 4.2, amirite?

LunarTeaHouse wrote:I'm still best friends with a dude I met on an AIM music chatroom in 2003. Hah. I visited him and his family in NYC for the first time in 2008 and then he came out here and now we see each other every few years. He and his friends got me into death metal and the whole dark subculture, inspired me to play guitar and everything. I don't know who I would be if I hadn't met him.

You know when you're 13 and you meet someone and you just think they're the coolest person in the world and you want to be just like them? That was how I felt about him and his cool NYC friends, heh. To a small, conservative town girl, they were like gods to me. Pretty funny looking back on it now. Oh, AIM.


Thanks for sharing that story. I feel like I can relate to some of that.
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