I was looking for the e-mail address of someone I knew of long ago and with who I want to get in contact again. He played in the past the MMORPG “Ultima Online”, just like I did… Oh, you don’t know what a MMORPG is? Pfffttt… so uneducated :P. It means Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, so a game that you play online with a huge of other people at the same time…. Check the wikipedia for a better and more extended explanation 🙂
Anyway, what is great way to find someone mail address? Yes, chat-programs, because often a mail address is stored along the profile of the user. So I had to think back what I was using at that time…. and suddenly it stroke me as thunder by daylight: At that time I was using ICQ, mother of all chat programs!!!
I just called ICQ mother of all chat-programs and that is course not completely true. On Unix systems there where already things as Talk and IRC available, but ICQ was the first chat-program that made a big hit all around the world. So yes, I still dare to call it the mother of all chat-programs.
I had a huge contact-list on ICQ, because everyone used ICQ. There were no real other options at that time.
ICQ still exists, but MSN and others came along and grab a large part of the ICQ-users away.
It was fun to see my old contact-list again, although no one was online and most likely not using ICQ anymore… Even over then the nicknames “Vestel” en “Zeno” were already there and those are still very good friends of mine 🙂
And oh, I found the mail address I was looking for. Lets hope my old friend is still using it!
Oh I so mis the IRC and ICQ times.
You went to an IRC Channel to talk about a topic to people who where interested in that topic. Where do you find that now.
An ICQ…… Wow, MSN did nothing, ICQ killed itself. First all the spam and Later AOL. What a shame…… But wishing back to the old daysis also wishing to th 28 KB modem…. Piep iep iep grrrr…. Piep piep. 😀
Oh ships. there was a time that i could recognise the speed of the modem by the sound….. hahaha
28.8 modems? Don’t be so advanced. My first modem was one with split baudrate, 1200/75 :).
I agree that ICQ killed itself… but not because of the spam. It didn’t grow. While other as AOL, Microsoft and other companies made their chat programs grow fast and enriched them with many new features.
Even the latest version of ICQ looks almost the same as the old ICQ.
😀 Well, I’m not that old 😀
As for ICQ. I don’t agree. The concept was great, but at the time that AOL acquired ICQ, its was over commercialized. I think the community then gave up on ICQ be course of AOL. (AOL was and stil is an internet within the internet.)