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Goodbye to AOL Instant Messenger, what’s next?
Once upon a time, AOL was the entry ramp to the internet super-highway. Subsequently, its instant-messaging system, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), became the first popular instant messaging (IM) system. Now, Verizon, AOL’s owner, is closing AIM’s doors on December 15, 2017.
Verizon claims AIM was “Where Instant Messaging began in 1997.” It’s not. But it introduced hundreds of millions of users to IM.
As Michael Albers, VP of Communications Product at Oath, AOL’s parent company, said, “If you were a 90s kid, chances are there was a time when AIM was a huge part of your life. You likely remember the CD, your first screenname, your carefully curated away messages, and how you organized your buddy lists. Right now you might be reminiscing about how you had to compete for time on the home computer in order to chat with friends outside of school. You might also remember how characters throughout pop culture from You’ve Got Mail to Sex and the City used AIM to help navigate their relationships.
That’s all true, but AIM was also immediately put to business use. You may have been flirting with your first girlfriend, but I was using it to talk to sources and editors. I wasn’t the only one.
As one of AIM’s creators, Barry Appelman, said. “AIM became how all Wall Street communicated”. So it was that AIM became the first major business IM system as well as the first major personal IM network. It was not, however, the first IM system.
You could argue that IM, along with email, really got its start with 1961’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). This IBM 7094 mainframe-based system enabled users to “message” each other via a common file system.
The first real IM dates later to 1965 when programmers set up “dot SAVED” on CTSS. With this, users could write directly to another user’s terminal. By 1970, the evolved CTSS code was including Multics, the operating system ancestor to Unix and Linux. In 1971, Multics was connected to the ARPANet, the internet’s predecessor. What you would recognize as IM was on its way.
Well, IM was on its way to technical circles. Ordinary users first met IM as CompuServe’s CB Simulator. Remember citizens band (CB) radio? “Breaker, breaker, good buddy?” No? Well, in its day it was wildly popular. This IM text version of this came out in 1980 and was also popular.
As the internet gained traction in technical circles, some Finnish hackers came up with the idea of an operating-system agnostic IM system, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), in 1988. It quickly became the most popular IM network for programmers and hackers and it remains so to this day.
None of these really grabbed the mass market’s attention. Most were too technical for ordinary users and CompuServe’s userbase was too small.
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