It would be years before I encountered it again. My first experience with instant messaging. She started getting upset that I wasn’t responding to her messages. I happened to know he had a pregnant wife at home. So I’m seeing these messages from her - she thinking that I’m this young man - and it quickly becomes clear that they are having an affair. They were from a young woman working in the call center who drove an expensive convertible and came to work in very short skirts telling people she didn’t wear panties. Didn’t even know instant messages were possible till they started popping up on my screen. I started getting these notices like I had never seen before. One day he signed me on using his own password, so I could do something or other for him. Hey, it was great pay at the time, and they really treated us well! Still don’t understand what “floating point” means, but oh well.Īnyway, one of the leads there was this nice looking guy, probably about 25 years old. Remember the Pentium FDIV bug back in 1994? Intel created a call center to take care of all the replacements and I took a temp job doing that.

I haven’t turned it on for years, though.

That means I was the 65,361’st person to use it. Today Facebook and Twitter (and Pownce and Jaiku) have totally replaced IM for me. I think they were scared of taking stuff out which people liked, too, which made it hard to improve. At some point after 2001 it stopped seeing radical improvements. In 1996 it seemed like there was a new feature every few days. It got too cluttered and stopped being developed. Unlike Twitter IM has an expectation that you’ll answer it sometime soon.īut that’s my problem and I’m an outlier. Why? Everytime I start it up I get a flurry of messages.

It was sold to AOL eventually where it never got best of class status, always remaining spiritually behind AOL’s other IM client, AIM).įor me IM started sucking more and more until it got to the point that today I can’t use it. I’ll tell you why (I was a very early user of ICQ, which was the first instant messaging client that I remembered seeing. Danny asks “ Why did we all stop using ICQ?”

Find my icq number