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.
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 :)
Being 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.
I 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!)
The Internet being an opt-in thing that you'd consciously connect to at a set our of the day, not something that would reach out to you and notify you about all kinds of things at random times, was definitely a different feeling.
Back then, it felt like a parallel world; now it's more like an overlay on this one.
I guess AI is the next thing that's still opt-in now, will be opt-out tomorrow and then no-escape. It would be interesting to read a nostalgic thread from 2070...
That's life isn't it? Mailing addresses, electricity, car-based transportation in the US, technologies and cultural institutions change and create worlds dependent on them to function. There was probably a time when the very idea that you stayed up after the sun set was seen as a silly modern affliction and indeed for most of human prehistory humans did not have access to artificial lighting. Now there are people, like me, who consider themselves as night owls.
This captures it quite well. I remember due to having dial up until around 2008, I’d compose a forum post “offline” on the computer, save it as a text file on a flash drive (previously a floppy!), and get around to posting it when I was able to get online.
Same for emails, etc. communication felt a lot more “thought out” in a sense - you would have limited time to send or receive information.
This is one of those things where I just don't understand what world people are living in, but it's always written in this bizarre passive voice where someone is just "the victim" of installing the Facebook app on their phone.
What is your experience of your phone and why are you so passive about it? You're getting unwanted notifications but, then, what, don't uninstall the app? Don't mute the app? Don't click "sign out"?
Facebook and its ilk are barred from issuing notifications on my devices. There’s so little real ‘friend’ interaction these days I don’t miss anything and they abused notifications so thoroughly by literally spamming me random group stuff that I’ve just disabled notifications as a way of counteracting the lack of granularity. Must be five years now.
You also had digital freedom and autonomy. You controlled how many ICQ accounts you had. Setting one up took a minute and cost nothing.
You chose the client you used to connect with. Noobs used the official ICQ adware and you used some 1337 open source client on Linux that could handle both ICQ and Jabber. But you could talk to them on the same platform.
Where are the alternative WhatsApp clients? Or iMessage? Or Telegram? You can't talk to anyone anymore unless you submit to one of a few megacorps and run their software.
It was a good era where when ICQ added too many ads and features to the 99a client, I was able to switch to an alternatives like Miranda IM and they didn't make any attempts to block the alternate clients.
The app (at least when I used it decades ago) didn’t recommend accounts to follow or insert junk in your list. That’s the key reason I resent all social media I use today.
Yup. Matrix and Jabber are what’s left. Sadly, all of the US is on iMessage, locking us not only into proprietary chat, but proprietary hardware to run the proprietary chat. I don’t really like my iPhone, but I bridge iMessage to my Matrix server, and as soon as I switch to Android, my iMessage account turns into email address only and I’m locked out. I’ve honestly considered paying for a phone line to an iPhone that stays plugged in at home, to free me to use whatever other phone I want to. That’s how far we’ve fallen.
> We attend a concert? We publish pictures and videos almost instantly
Switch to a data plan with less than 2GB of data per month and you'll be a lot more thoughtfull about how much you post instantly. You may still post it but you'll do it when you get home; just like the old days.
I was on a 2GB data plan for most of this past decade, despite being terminally online, it never really got in the way. Would still share pictures immediately, they aren't that big (and most services compress video down to too horrible quality for it to be worth sharing). Still never managed to hit 2GB in a month.
The vast majority of my data usage now, on unlimited, comes from watching YouTube.
I've been pondering library box and pirate box kind of setups as well as mesh networks. I've never used any of that but the idea of having a separate network bound to a location seems rather interesting (be it in a kind of pokemon go kind of way)
You get a new flavor of privacy, no moaning about copyright, no nonsensical political correctness, much less need for security, people you can do things with irl and possibly very high bandwidth use or cpu intensive applications. It might even have limited time service like say outside office hours.
We use to have a popular forum around here ran by a pub. It became to much work to maintain and the owner wasn't interested enough. It was suppose to be for regular visitors.
If it was only accessible locally and on its own wifi network you set it up once and it would work just fine. Not having access to the darts competition from home is a feature not a drawback.
you reminded me that we used to pay for Internet access by the hour. You'd pay $X for one hour of Internet use, so you'd go online, do a thing and then disconnect to save money. local vs remote for email was such a different time. you'd have a fat client on your laptop, and you'd do a bunch of writing offline, before connecting, having the program sync, and then disconnect.
I still feel bad I left my parents' computer online all night to download a .wav (?) audio file of Mario jumping from Nintendo.com. Back then, the closest most kids got to Nintendo was via video game magazines. So going to Nintendo.com for the first time and downloading an audio file was a special moment. The download was taking hours and I have no idea how much it cost my parents. I just remember being so disappointed the next day when it turned out to only be a 1 second audio file. THAT WAS IT?!?! I WAITED ALL THAT TIME FOR THAT? :)
Wait, it didn't take an entire night to download a 1 sec wav (assuming the worst) file, did it?
1 sec of wav would be 176.4 kB (assuming 44.1 kHz, 16 bits, stereo), or 176.4 * 1024 * 8 bits. That divided by 28800 bits/s (assuming a 28k modem) gives 50.1 seconds.
A 96 kHz 32 bit stereo wav would be 768 kB, 4-5 times that so still less than 5 minutes.
This was a very long time ago, so I don't remember all details. But yes the download took hours. This was basically the first website I visited when I got internet access (and I would assume most kids did as well). So this predates 28.8 modems. I believe I had a 14.4 modem, was out in the country, and websites were not stable. This is somewhat of a core memory for me, so I do remember some details clearly.
Simply going to Nintendo.com took a very long time. Lots of us regular users started coming online for the first time and likely overloaded their servers. Navigating to the section of the website where it listed audio files to download was a whole endeavor of itself. It took multiple attempts to download that dang jumping sound. I would leave it running during the day and when I came back later, the download would have randomly timed out. And I think at least once my parents picked up one of phones in the house and messed it up. I believe as a kid I quickly learned that the web was faster at night time when less people were online. So after several failed attempts, I started it at night time and woke up to it completed. Not sure if you were online at that time, but I don't think you can simply reduce this to math equation.
There's no way a 14.4 modem would have taken a whole night to download a wav sound effect. Not even a 2400 modem would take remotely that long. You were doing something wrong.
I'm happy to believe the internet was slow and unreliable back them especially from the countryside (actually, I know it for a fact), but assuming a 7 hour night and a 1 second wav file (176.4 * 1000 * 8 = 1411200 bits, I made a mistake in my last comment) would mean 56 bits per second, that's 7 bytes/sec, that would be unusable to browse the web, even by the standards of this past. That's also far from what a 14.4 kbit/s modem is supposed to achieve, even considering that 14.4 kbit/s is a theoretical max and you'd be typically way below this speed in actual use. Hence our surprise.
At this speed, it would have taken you several minutes (and since the internet was unreliable, probably several attempts) to even load nintendo.com and then the download page. The simplest page I know in the wild, perdu.com, is 203 bytes, 909 bytes with the HTTP headers, that would take more than 2 minutes to load at that speed. nintendo.com was likely more complex than that. Given this, you'd have to have some very strong will and patience to go ahead and download a sound for fun as a child (though I can picture this).
I can only assume it didn't take the full night (you woke up on a finished download, it most likely did finish (way) before you were done sleeping), and that there's more to the story that the elements we have. What's still strange to me is that if it took say half an hour, with such a strong determination, would you have gone to sleep instead of excitedly waiting for the download to finish?
I'm not saying your memory is wrong or that you are lying or something like this, I'm sure this recollection is genuine and that it is a strong and fond memory, and I understand that it was long ago so difficult to remember the details, just that we are missing some critical piece to make something complete of your story for ourselves.
And sure, not everything can be reduced to math, but that's our best tool for estimating / evaluating stuff as distant observers.
I don't think I ever stated the download took all night. I said I left the computer connected to the Internet overnight, and it cost $$$ when you pay per hour.
During the day, yes it was taking hours. That does not mean it was downloading at some consistent rate for hours. I would start the download, then it would slow, then stall, and I would leave it and come back later to see it timed out. Rinse and repeat until I tried at night time. For some reason you all are trying to explain why this is impossible using math without considering any other factors (downloads can timeout, IE didn't resume downloads, picking up the phone would disconnect the connection, etc).
Did you all never download those 15-30 part warez versions on Photoshop, 3DS Max, etc. back in the day? I'm talking later, e.g. 28.8 modem days. It would take me several days, and in some cases a week, to download all of those parts. Sure, they were much larger. But the download would stop, timeout, pause for long periods. It wasn't simply a math equation: File size, modem capability = x minutes. I did not work on the infra side of Nintendo.com or any warez site as a pre-teen so I can't comment further on their scalability.
Public internet access did coincide with appearance of 14.4kbit/s modems here (Serbia) yet 9600 "baud" was actually more common, but you still rarely got that speed out of them.
Still, I don't ever remember needing hours to download a tiny wav file (though I mostly looked for MIDI music as that was long songs in a few kb).
You may be confusing things. By the time nintendo.com had a website, they were aready oferring small trailers in .mov (cuts from the stuff they would ship in vhs). A wav would have been very quick to download; a couple second QuickTime file -- not so much.
Or just don't take your phone out? I always read these threads and think that the folks here probably have issues disconnecting and so they're longing for a world where social pressures forced disconnection. I still frequently don't check my socials until after work or after a long social activity. I'm upfront with my contacts about that too, and most of my friends are like me. I only monitor my phone constantly if I'm awaiting an important call or email, but then I usually have something big going on in my life at the time.
I use my phone mostly as a PDA. Quick searches, reading Hacker News and RSS, Chatting (very infrequently), calls, and utilities. No socials apps, no games. And I have an ereader and a digital audio player for books and music.
I have plenty of social apps but they're pretty much on perma-mute except for folks like my partner or my parents who have "priority access" to my attention. During work hours work gets access, but they go on mute after hours + 2 (since I generally work a bit late.) I have a work pager setup on my phone if someone really needs me for work. Works out fine for me FWIW. I'll shitpost when I have time/brain space but leave them alone for days or even weeks if I'm occupied enough.
Does it matter? Was society behaving like you in other ways back then? I'm younger than the set here but not young certainly, and I distinctly remember how lonely it was to be a nerd in the '90s. I've assumed through most of my life that the most you can do is control how you and your circle behave. My circle varies on the introversion/extroversion scale where I'm in the middle and roughly get back to comms within a day, my more introverted friends may take multiple days, and have extroverted friends who get back within hours or even minutes. My partner is on the extroverted side and is constantly monitoring her comms but before the smartphone she had a rich rolodex of contacts who she was constantly calling.
Why do people have to follow you? I also experienced the "offline first" life and while I miss the wilder, more unsanitized nature of the internet from back then, I much prefer being able to always be connected.
> Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you.
Reminds me of personal experience of course but also the "Less Than Three" video [0], which in turn reminds me of the GUNSHIP Art3mis & Parzival music video [1]. I'll probably never watch the Ready Player One movie again, but I'll likely watch the GUNSHIP video another 100x.
I remember around 2007 or so a mobile provider here offered these “feature phones”, I think made by Huawei, that had zero rated MSN, Skype, and a couple of other services.
Went from “only available when at the PC” to “always online” overnight.
Got even funnier when someone worked out you could abuse the phone as a rather slow, but free, internet connection due to how poorly implemented the zero rating was done on those services :)
ICQ did support offline messages, from the beginning afaik, too. I had a 6-digit uin (485358 or something similar), until it got banned for running a bot (whoops).
To the sibling reply, I think AIM and ICQ did have interop on messages at some point, it was much later than when ICQ moved protocols to OSCAR and TOK though.
I can't remember, but I don't think MSN had offline messages. And I don't think ICQ lost offline messaging in the OSCAR transition, IIRC, ICQ moved to OSCAR with offline messages, then AIM got them, then AIM and ICQ could talk for a while (but all my ICQ contacts that I kept had moved to AIM or MSN by then anyway).
As I recall, originally, the ICQ client polled the server via UDP to see if it had any messages, and then you would do peer to peer for online messaging. But when you logged in, you'd get a cascade of the offline messages (uh, uh, uh, uh-oh)
Woah, ICQ had peer-to-peer? I thought it was quite centralized! Was that before the OSCAR migration?
I only remember Skype being "true" peer-to-peer, with your PC randomly becoming a presence/call relaying "supernode" if you had a publicly reachable IP and good connectivity. Different times!
Yeah, ICQ was peer to peer for online messaging as I recall in the say 97-99 timeframe. I think Yahoo was too. They'd fall back to server message passing, of course.
But this was just for messaging (and file transfer), not for presence/buddy list which was all server driven.
In that time frame, few had firewalls or NAT or two computers at the same location, so (server mediated) peer to peer just worked unless you were on a corporate network.
There were even some tools that showed you the IP, the "real status" and etc. of your contacts. The 9 year old me have felt like the greatest hacker of all time when using those tools :)
Circa 2000 or so, when AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ were all flourishing, Yahoo had already added offline messages. ICQ, I think also had them, though it was probably configurable, I recall the client having a half dozen screens of options. At that moment, neither MSN nor AIM had it yet. AIM eventually did add it, though I don't recall if it was added to AIM after ICQ de-merged from the AIM backend.
There was also Meebo, which allowed you to login to all of them via a web interface (which I believe none of the messengers had natively) without installing the respective clients!
Meebo was sick. I remember they never made any money though as an IM webapp, and eventually fully pivoted to some kind of on-page ad toolbar that site owners would add to their sites...for some reason.
It was MSN. I remember when MSN arrived late to the game, and managed to get users anyway, despite not having such an obvious feature, that the incumbent had.
Your phone experience reminds me of how, at about age 18, I coveted a Sidekick so much. I knew that it had AIM built-in. Since SMS was too expensive for me to consider a replacement for instant messaging, this seemed to me like the holy grail of teen socializing. To be able to use AIM anytime, anywhere...I could only imagine how cool it would be, especially if all my friends had it too.
I finally got something exactly like that in 2008 (both with mobile AIM clients, and as SMS and iMessage steadily overtook AIM for the purposes we used IM for), but it strikes me as poignant that as an adult, it wasn't really as meaningful to me as it would have been as a teen.
I guess what I'm saying is actually, I kind of get why the gen-z kids became so terminally online. I would have availed myself of the ability to socialize, privately, nonstop day and night!
The "proper" way of using ICQ from your phone was Jimm, an unofficial Java client. I was the cool kid with a patched Siemens phone, which could run native apps, so I used NatICQ.elf instead.
Haha, what Siemens phone could you patch to run native apps on? I must have switched to Nokia/Symbian before that became a thing. (That could run both native S60 and J2ME apps – basically infinite apps and games!)
Decades ago there was encryption that one of those clients (maybe pidgin) layered on top of AIM. It used 128-bit blowfish for the cipher, but the key was negotiated with 128-bit diffie hellman, which killed the security.
I started to implement the number field sieve to demonstrate this, but got lost in the weeds and moved on to other stuff.
>(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
I just logged in for the first time in over 25 years a few weeks ago. I found 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.
Thanks, 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 :(
For 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!
I 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.
Same 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.
Unlike 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.
Isn'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?
I 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).
I 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.
Yeah, 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).
58843787 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.
I 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.
I don't remember my ICQ number but I can remember a dozen F2P MMOs from the early / mid-2000s and most of my usernames but I need to look up `tar -xvzf` every time even with an awareness of the Arnold Schwarzenegger meme.
I find it amusing that I still remember this right off the bat despite not having used it for 15 years, but I don't remember my phone number from the same time period.
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.
You should keep trying. Looks like your account was not deleted, but check if the name/description matches what you had the last you remember - https://icq.im/4125222/en
Yeah definitely, it was EXo before but I hid it. Because hiding one’s identity was a thing back in the day. Maybe I should try to login, but the logs were local, were they?
Yeah I did not realize how much people like to have low number IDs. I signed up very early on but my friends bailed so I did too. No idea what even happened to that account and the email addresses I used at the time are also lost after being abandoned. Given average password sophistication at the time, I'm sure it got hacked/hijacked at some point.
I didn’t consider that it was a low number, just posted because I remembered it. But I’m also now realizing that wasn’t actually my ID, it was the middle six numbers of a UPC on a 1 1/4 oz 25 cent bag of Doritos in the early 90’s. Oops.
42731249. I still remember this shit without any hesitation, incl. password. And have not used the service for 20 years either.
And then, I continuously forget the name of colleagues I see at least every other day.
3048666
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
I 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!
As 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
My 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.
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.