This is the best summary I could come up with:
But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it simultaneously laid the groundwork for direct messaging and social networking as we came to know it in the post-Facebook era.
In the wake of the Netscape IPO, which heralded a new era of tech-based money-making ventures, the four of them were looking for an idea to run with.
The application didn’t have much marketing behind it, but it spread quickly by word of mouth—particularly in nascent online gaming communities around multi-user dungeons (MUDs), early deathmatches, and so on.
ICQ was eventually purchased by AOL, and it lost ground to more heavily financially backed services like AIM and MSN.
That company eventually morphed and changed its name to VK, and it has been keeping ICQ on life support as a sort of Russian Skype alternative since.
I signed up because I was playing the online game Meridian 59, and its community largely used ICQ for out-of-game communication.
The original article contains 571 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That wallpaper is cray!
I would have also accepted
- warcraft 3
- Heros of might and Magic
- Warhammer (bit of a push there though)
I think it’s Ruins of Kunark
https://www.keithparkinson.com/product/ruins-of-kunark-photo-stock-print/
Buy a print to support the original artist
The thing about that screenshot that has me curious is the shortcut to 7zip which, although it has been around for longer than I realised, no one really used until the 2nd half of the 00’s
Given the presence of 7zip almost definitely
Which makes it kinda more interesting tbh—did someone at Ars set this up to take a screenshot of ICQ? Getting a windows 98 VM set up with all that other stuff just for an article image seems like a lot of effort for a journalist who probably needs to get a few articles written a week.
If it wasn’t Ars, who was it and why did they set up a somewhat period-accurate windows 98 VM and then take a screenshot of ICQ out of everything?
Maybe I’m thinking too hard about this
uh oh
I had a parrot at the time and she picked up on the uh oh and would repeat it, exactly like the system, all the time.
The ICQ uh-oh is my text alert message. Has been for years. No one recognizes it anymore.
Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I’m not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.
Must have been thinking of that handle’s Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.
… and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I’m going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.
