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.
Another reminder of how things change over time.
1303789
Serious question - why do so many people remember our ICQ numbers? I don’t remember what user-facing function it served. Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect?
I suppose it also came at a time for a lot of us where things seemed to wedge into our brains more easily.
It is from a time when we were used to remember phone numbers, and where we shared our phone numbers to keep in touch (calls, sms). ICQ directly picked on that and it was just another „phone number“.
Unfortunately I only remember the first half of mine after so many years. In the age of smartphones, at least my brain degenerated to not be able to recall more than a handful of important phone numbers.
I still remember the phone number I had from when I was 10-19, but I can't remember my sons or my mums phone numbers, or indeed any numbers I've had or used since I was 19 other than my current number that I got in my 30's. Basically, the moment I got my first cellphone in '95 or so, I stopped learning phone numbers, other than remembering my current number because I give it out regularly.
But also, I think, because my parents drilled that old number into me, because remembering it was a "lifeline".
I made a point to memorize my wife's and my parents' cell numbers, just in case I'm ever in a situation where I don't have a phone and need to reach them (like if I got robbed or something).
It's a sensible thing to do, but I have so many ways to get at online services where I can reach them that it hasn't felt pressing - if I'm in a situation where the only phone I can get hold of isn't a smartphone it sounds more like a 999 or nearest consulate kind of situation... But you're right it'd probably be worth doing anyway.
So you get robbed (or something), and you're physically OK but have no phone and no wallet.
You find a phone to use, however you do that, and dial the local emergency number (0118 999 881 999 119 725...3), and maybe they show up and take a report.
And then they leave.
Now, you're in the same situation you were in before (no phone, no wallet) -- nothing has really changed.
What happens next? What's your next move?
831364 but suffered an account takeover. ICQ shutting down mildly eases this long torment of losing the 6-digit account.
Happened to me too. 666260
Yeah, kinda crazy.
I didn't even remember ICQ had numbers until I read the first comment in this thread posting theirs and most of the number immediately popped into my head, 10238* (cant remember last two).
Makes me wonder what other things in my brain are back in archive, just needing the right push to bring to surface.
4007929... great question...!
That's cause we used to have to remember everything. We don't anymore. This guys explains it more hilariously than I ever could.
I remember mine, 15254346. Good question...
Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect?
Yes, exactly.
I agree with the suggestion that people just don't commit as many things to memory anymore, but that doesn't explain why we still remember certain random numbers from so long ago, while forgetting others. I can instantly recall my ICQ number, but there are plenty of old friends' phone numbers I've forgotten, and those were people I called multiple times a week for years.
Here's a free hypothesis: Maybe it was important to remember your ICQ number. Without it, your message history and contact list was out of reach. In that sense, it fits in the same mental space as a password. What I mean is, there was a cost to losing it. So, you were incentivized to commit it to memory in a way that you weren't with many other numbers.
In contrast, while it would be inconvenient to forget a friend's phone number if you wanted to chat with them, at least you had options. You could generally look them up in the white pages, or call a another friend and get their number, or just ask them when you saw that person again at school the next day.
So, the cost for not remembering a phone number was lower than the cost for not remembering your own ICQ number, and this probably made it mentally stickier.
... Another possibility is a confirmation bias. Maybe we're just not hearing from the 95% of ICQ users who can't remember their number.
448 484 004. It was weirdly easy to remember and like everyone else here, almost 2 decades later I still remember it. I miss those simpler days, Discord makes it much easier to connect with larger groups of people these days but it just isn't the same magic. Or maybe it's all just rose coloured nostalgia glasses? Either way, it's pretty sad.
Was that actually the identifier we shared with people to connect?
Yes. It was like giving out your telephone number.
I think it showed it in the client along with your name handle.
Maybe was the easiest way to add people you knew in real life, esp if you didn't make your real name searchable. (Remember at the time people were more paranoid about staying anonymous on the Internet; this was before most social networks.)
Mine was easy to remember, so I did. Mostly repeating digits. 2288665
Likely the same reason I remember my grandparents (now passed) phone number. A handful of digits I saw or referenced a lot.
When you joined ICQ you received a UIN and that was the only publicly searchable method to connect to other people. You could update your profile with email or username, and manually make that public, but it wasn't searchable by default. If you wanted to connect to a stranger (and the stranger didn't want their email public at the time), you would usually just use their UIN.
84369534
I mean it was basically your phone number for chat. I'm sure many people remember their childhood phone number as well.
1657721. Yeah. Why do I remember this 25+ years later. I guess you did have to tell someone else the number so they could find you. Maybe that's it?
889246**
I forgot what I had for lunch yesterday but somehow I can remember my ICQ number.
9507416
Hmm I only remembered it partially, but I see it was on old phpbb boards. That said, password is probably gone forever.
>why do so many people remember
>I suppose it also came at a time for a lot of us where things seemed to wedge into our brains more easily.
That is why recalling phone numbers, large (mentally untoken-able) words, and the digits of PI all are far easier when done in the sing-song fashion - it is utilizing the highly-optimized linguistic/recall portion, we evolved to handle the near-rote-memorization required to allow our culture to survive.
IRC will never die
Being self-hostable it can never die completely but lets face it, in most communities it's a hollowed out husk of what it used to be since Discord took off.
And yet, it’ll still be around after Discord shuts down.
But would IRC be what a post-Discord exodus actually goes back to? Lacking basic modern amenities like seamless scrollback and push notifications is going to be a hard sell for the generation that grew up with Discord. As a sibling mentioned, Matrix is closer to the mark.
v3 has a lot of features folks don’t talk about. But XMPP MUCs are still kicking too.
There is also Zulip, that I think is opensource.
Doesn't matter. IRC serves a niche that there's always a community for that no matter how small it'd become. I'd place a bet that it won't die as long as there's computer and internet. Long live IRC.
My reading (and maybe I'm wrong because the comment was terse) is that IRC will never die, because it is not a commercial interest that can be shuttered. It's an open protocol and anyone can spin up a server.
Any community you build inside a walled garden can be taken from you. I do think that is important to keep in mind.
It can't die because of that, but the reason we use things like reddit and discord and slack is because those are not open protocols -- they have monied interests behind getting people to use them
The idealism of the internet in the 80s and 90s never could survive past the growth phase.
I don't use reddit, discord and slack because they are not open protocols. I use them because of the network effect and only reluctantly. Look at the relatively recent success of software like bittorrent and know that idealism and commercialism both live and die by the network effect. We aren't doomed to live in walled gardens forever.
I think you can credit a win to IRC recently, too, when someone tried to buy control of Freenode and it seems (as least as an onlooker) that everyone successfully coordinated upping stakes and moving to a new network. I don't use IRC, but I find that impressive.
I think everything you said was true, but I would point out that I think of this as a practical rather than ideological position. I'm not saying it never makes sense to build inside of a walled garden, I'm saying there is a costly tradeoff. I would speculate that it might be more important going forward, but time will tell.
Discord's main "ease of use" features: Centralized user management, centralized server discovery, server hosting
What it does technically could be replicated by current technologies.
Emojis, video streaming, screen streaming.
Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord just rely on Nitro subscriptions?
Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord just rely on Nitro subscriptions?
It's a gold mine of data for things like market research, ad targeting/fingerprinting, and more recently AI training.
DOS Game Club on AfterNET is still really active, for those who have an interest in checking it out.
Matrix too
A few weeks ago I shut down my self hosted znc bouncer that I still logged in every few weeks to download logs, see if I got pinged somewhere and catch up with some low traffic channels.
I then switched over to https://www.irccloud.com and it's such a improvement as I can use it on my phone, now I'm pretty active again and I kinda missed it.
Are there any self-hosted alternatives?
For IRC bouncers there's many, but I'm not aware of anything that has a web interface, phone app, push notifications and all kept in sync. The market is pretty small.
Alternatively there's many bridges these days so you can use Matrix with one of the many apps supported.
I'm not aware of anything that has a web interface, phone app, push notifications and all kept in sync.
IRCCloud does. Or if you want an open source stack: Soju as bouncer, Gamja as web interface, and Goguma as Android app. If you have a paid Sourcehut account you get Soju+Gamja hosted for you at https://chat.sr.ht/ .
I'm not sure The Lounge and Quassel support push notifications, but they otherwise fit your requirements.
IRCCloud does.
You replied to my post where I said I switched to IRCCloud and the person asked for self hosted alternatives to it :P
I haven't used it, but Quassel looks like a similar idea.
Alternatively using a Soju[1] with Goguma[2] for phone and Gamja[3] for web could work; FWIW, I use Soju, but not the other two.
1: https://sr.ht/~emersion/soju/
Yes, but in the same way that WordStar still has some loyal users.
I don't even remember what my ICQ number was. It was the first social network I joined.
why should ICQ be a social network?
What makes you think it wasn't a social network?
It is only a chat platform and it predates the first social networks (which were explicitly called "social networks" back then). This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but I think people use the term "social network" way to much so that it doesn't even mean anything any more.
I don't know what the official ICQ client does today but back in the day it had more than just chats between people. It had file sharing, etc.
We associate other stuff like sharing and virality with social networks. Isn't the phone network just as much of a social network as ICQ?
I think party lines on the phone, yes.
In the purest sense of those two words it was a social way to interact with a network of people?
That's very fuzzy. What about e-mail? Or the phone network? Or the internet in general? Yes, there can be some social aspects to it. But that by itself does not make it into a social network.
Networks have topologies and paths. The social graph matters on facebook because you get connected to your friend's friends which is a core feature of the platform. This is not the case with chat platforms.
I probably won’t install the suggested replacement of VK Messenger, I have to say. No more 71966195.
251437659, still remember my number even though I haven't been using ICQ for more than two decades.
Funny how we remember some numbers our entire lives, despite never using them. I can still rattle off my ICQ number, last used nearly 25 years ago, my compuserve ID which I left in 1998, my phone number as a kid, last used about 1994.
I also remember various license plates my family had in the mid 90s, but I struggle to remember my own license plate number now. The only two phone numbers I know are mine and my wife's. I can still remember my high school's phone number though - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it much.
When I was 7, my dad wrote a "game" in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and one section required a "secret" (you could see it if you listed the program...) code to gain access. The code was 32744. I have not used that game for more than 40 years, but it'll probably be one of the last things I remember...
I can still remember my high school's phone number though - for some really odd reason as I can't have phoned it much.
Any chance it was a number your parents made you learn, or on a phone list next to / on the phone?
7106568
How the hell I keep remembering it?!? I haven't used ICQ for more than 15 years?
Maybe repetition works surprisingly well.
same for 6141850 although it wouldn't work when I tried to log in like 5 years ago.
Imagine a world where all apps had numeric user ids and people memorized them.
Here's the ICQ song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va8dnGF3Xyw
7289581
All I can say is: "Uh oh!"
Man I gotta say that experience was ruined by the 10 second ad I had to endure ahead of it. I really wish YouTube would just not try to monetize videos that are shorter than the ads.
NewPipe or uBlock Origin will prevent your experiences from being ruined in the future.
Somehow I'm having Worms Armageddon flashbacks
I tried many times to set this sound as my sms notification sound for nostalgia… and gave up every time. It sounded great on the computer but it’s very jarring and obnoxious on the phone when it runs out of nowhere. Unfortunate because nostalgia
You beat me to it. As soon as I read the title, I heard it in my mind.
I have the ICQ "Uh OH!" sound in rotation as a text message alert sound for work/support contacts.
It's pretty jarring, as y'all know, so it doesn't do to have as the default sound, but it it's great for important contacts that don't message much.
Honestly it's a bewildering choice for the default "message received" sound of an IM client. It's so very alarming. I can only guess that the makers were expecting you to be a room away from your tower PC (with its deluxe 18" CRT display and mouse cables that required a screwdriver) to make sure you never missed a message.
These days, when you're never more than a layer of fabric away from your IM, it's a bit much. But man, effective.
LOL :-)
Well... I don't know that they ever officially released a protocol spec, but libpurple implements ICQ so at least enough of the protocol was reverse engineered or understood somehow to allow for OSS clients. So I suppose somebody could start from there and build a compatible server. Of course it might wind up only being compatible with Pidgin and other libpurple based clients, and the market for this is probably approximately 16 people worldwide. But still, it would be kinda fun.
1. What has happened to us that 16M people is something we just laugh at as an inconsequential number, wtf.
2. SNR on those 16M people is probably well above average in the vector of most interesting people on the planet.
Either the parent edited their post, or you misread it by 6 orders of magnitude.
perfect HN comment, no notes
What has happened to us that 16M people is something we just laugh at as an inconsequential number, wtf.
I literally meant 16 total people. To be fair, that was a bit of hyperbole, but the point is that there probably aren't a lot of people looking to use an "open source ICQ alternative" in 2024.
That doesn't mean that somebody shouldn't still do it, but it would probably be a passion project, more than something that would make money. At least that's my guess. :-)
16, not 16M.
Not 16M, 16. Very different.
ICQ will stop working from June 26
You can chat with friends in VK Messenger, and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace
Was ICQ like Livejournal, where it had a lot more popularity and staying power in Russia than in the West?
Kind of like WhatsApp vs iMessage, ICQ was more international than alternatives like AIM or MSN
And dunno about AIM, but MSN took a looooong time to implement things like offline messaging. ICQ didn’t (ever?) need the double coincidence of being online. Even iMessage and its fallback SMS today are bad for this.
Fun MSN story: I read you could put curse words in your name subtitle if you used 0x ascii hex codes for one of the characters.
So I pulled up the list of ascii codes and hoped that “beep” would work, but it did not make anyone beep. Then I tried null, and it made all my contacts go offline, and offline again as soon as they logged back in. Again and again. Except myself (can’t remember if that was because I used a 3rd party client aMSN) Hehe. Had people apologize to me for suddenly dropping mid convo.
Absolutely yes. Damn, these times were something else.
Not from Russia, but pretty close in all senses of the word. It was heavily used in my circles up to about 2010-2011, then started losing market share to other messengers (one¹ of the popular messengers was from the same company that now owns ICQ), and then Telegram came and buried it completely in no time at all.
Even though it was mostly just Russians wanting to practice their English last time I used it a couple of decades ago I will miss this service.
9805028
What I really miss is the era when every chat service was on an open protocol so you could have a single app that supported everybody no matter what service they used.
mostly just Russians wanting to practice their English
I guess that explains their recommendation of VK Messenger as a replacement.
360487731
Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010.
I remember I paid $600 or so to Mirabilis around 1996 to buy their http server library to save the development time.
All chat platforms (that I can remember) that were popular around that time used proprietary protocols, including ICQ. Everyone I knew preferred third-party clients to the official one, and these clients would sometimes break because ICQ kept changing tiny details in the protocol to try to force users to use the official client. It never worked, of course, because updates that fixed compatibility would usually come within a couple of hours.
Goodbye from 201253
Woah, that's a low number.
there was a big market for short numbers back in the day. i remember buying a 6-digit icq number for a 10€ paysafecard when i was like 14 in a "hacker" forum lol
The hack was to scan ICQ numbers for their associated email addresses, filter by big providers like Hotmail and Yahoo and try to sign up for the same address. Some were abandoned and you could use the username again. Then password-reset in ICQ and voila, there’s your 6-digit ICQ number.
But yeah, I bought a 6 digit number on eBay for 5-10 bucks too ;)
I feel old now..
Goodbye from 6605455.
See ya.
- 1939647
gg. 466368349
See ya from 54198743. Weird how I remember this one better than any of my phone numbers
Farewell, ICQ.
Sincerely, 1339782
I assumed it was already dead, just on a lark I went to sign in and it appears to require a phone number now, not my old number? so I guess it has not actually been "ICQ" in a while?
edit: ah, they're doing the odious "use an sms to allow your account to be compromised login" instead of passwords. Then they say "your account has been compromised" until you add a phone number
You can bypass the phone number login using the link on the top left, and instead login with your ICQ number and password.
yeah, that was my edit but I realize I didn't actually clarify that just what it was doing. But it then will just claim your account has been compromised until you give them a number :D
You can bypass that second screen as well (or at least, it let me do so for my account).
I know this doesn't add much value to the discussion, but I was really proud of my UIN when I was a teenager. And this may be my last chance to flaunt it, so here it is:
1779900
So back in the day, these were known as Universal Internet Numbers, or UINs. You have to admire the sheer audacity of using that name for the user identifiers of a service you're building. I believe they were renamed to "ICQ#" later.
Strictly speaking, sequential numbers can scale infinitely, so not the worst way to handle it.
Same, nice repeating digits. 2288665
That’s a very impressive UIN!
Official ICQ client got bloated for every release. Security issues and lots of spam.
Miranda IM, open source plugin based architecture, was the best client for ICQ.
There was a fun plugin that notified you if anyone read your away message. Good trolling potential.
I remember when Pidgin was my defacto chat app because it had all of the platforms and none of the bloat.
and it's brother Adium on OS X.
Hasn't it not actually been ICQ for a while now? I thought the original service with the numbers (387175) was shut down and replaced with something else entirely at some point.
I believe you're right on this. The original ICQ number accounts got merged into AOL Instant Messenger, and for a while you could log into AIM with your ICQ number. I think the original ICQ died when AIM got shut down.
i was able to sign in with my number and password just now, had to click link in the upper left to get around the phone number request
It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.
I don't remember file transfer being very reliable, it used direct connections between clients so if you had a router it wouldn't work.
We only had dial-up connections with a real IPv4 address back when I used ICQ.
Bummer. End of an era for sure. But it's dying even back then 20 years ago.
I was an ICQ user but I haven't logged in since the early 2000s I would guess? I have a faint recollection of maybe using Trillium during its heyday with ICQ maybe in the 2003-2004 time period?
Really? My impression was 2 decades ago it was pretty popular, at least lots of my high school mates used it.
I never, and eventually picked YM instead few years later.
Many good memories... Goodbye from 99184387
Eyoo I was 99485387 just two digits diff, nice!
ICQ still WORKED? Wow.
I liked it but the problem was that it didn't have contact list sync, server-based scrollback and other mod cons. And of course that they totally screwed it up with adware.
They repurposed it into a Telegram clone a few years ago, they even had nearly the same bot API and you could import stickers. The desktop client is also a near copycat. It was called "ICQ New"
It's been dead a long time, it just had a brief afterlife in Russia.
Chat apps aren't cheap like the old days, now they require a large moderation staff. Maybe AI will change that?
ICQ is/was mainly for one-to-one and small group chats, much like Signal or WhatsApp. I don't think that use case needs a large moderation staff; I consider even having the ability to do most kinds of moderation an anti-feature in that kind of tool since it means the communication is not truly private.
ICQ had a first mover advantage, and lost it. But why?
Being first mover isn't an advantage, mostly.
Atari is dead. Shoutcast is dead. Compuserve and GEnie are long dead, AOL is dead too. Outside of forums like these, nobody knows who made the first personal computers or smartphones, because it doesn't matter to them.
It's a lot easier to build the second insant messaging system than the first because you can see how it works before you build it.
uh oh!
I really like it how they were still using exactly this uh-oh sound at least in some McDonald's restaurants in my area :)
490202 signing off
402777 here!
I freaked my girlfriend out once because I had my (desktop, a large tower!) computer connected to my stereo. I had left for some reason and there was no music playing, but ICQ would play a little knocking sound when someone logged in. She had heard it three times from the living room, scanned every door and window to find out who was knocking :-)
Fun forgetting your speakers were cranked and getting a message. " Uh oh!" waking up the whole house.
RIP
2412581 - I don't think I'll ever forget my UIN
Proud to be part of this generation of "instant messengers". Long, long before texting, me and my peers were living the future life!
Instant messengers were great — better than texting and better than posting on FB/Twitter IMO. I loved away messages, which were ephemeral and not spammed to your network. We're getting a little of that functionality with iOS's DND status, but it's not customizable.
My theory is that FB didn't want to enable away messages because then people would just set it once and not log in for a long time. It's a shame that a feature that was common 20 years ago is now only starting to make a comeback.
91245402
501108 - never forget
I didn't even know it was still working
I think until recently it was still popular (or used enough) in Russia when Telegram finally took over.
Finally. It's been an FSB spying frontend for years anyway.
To spy on who? Why would the FSB use ICQ? Isn't it basically a completely dead platform?
Gadu Gadu, the contemporary clone from Poland, is still up. I don't know if anyone uses it.
All my friends left it years ago and moved to either whatsapp or fb messenger, some opted for telegram. From what people wrote in appstore it seems that GG become some kind of social network filled with spam and scam profiles.
I tried to log in by site right now and my password isn't recognized anymore; and it also seems to be loading something from tiktok there
And yet Gadu-Gadu, its Polish clone, is chugging along after its userbase has been decimated by Facebook Messenger (WhatsApp did not take over the market as much as in the other EU countries).
IIRC GG is in 5th hands now since Łukasz Fołtyn created it
see you, space cowboy - 1179666
It has been years since they let me use my ultra short ICQ number from the 1990s.
See ya'!
Oh, I didn’t even know it was still running. I’d used it when it was latched. Don’t even re my number, but I have very fond memories of using it.
For everyone proudly displaying their old ICQ numbers, just be aware that there are still sites that have some of the info tied to the numbers archived (presumably what was made public/status). So, there may be some easily-access publicly identifiable information that you don't want associated with your current HN username. (I just did a search and I found that my old icq# had a phone number linked to it)
spooky, only last month I was trying to recover my password, oh for those simpler days on the internet. 36063000
see you on the flip side
RIP ICQ. I still have logs of chats from highscool. It was really my first foray into the idea of chat. I remember that I once did a presentation for a linguistics class on the use of emoji and the various shorthands that showed up in chat and people were actually interested because it was so new(1).
(1) Yes IRC far predated ICQ but the linguistic norms there differed significantly from ICQ, it was all in my presentation, you had to be there :)
Wait, ICQ has been working?! BTW I still remember my ICQ number although I haven't used this messenger in many years.
Many years ago go a girl who liked me gifted a 6 digit icq number.
I still remember that. Sigh.
Hm, I dont' remember it now, it was over 20 years old :).
I signed up for it to complete my config of Trillian, which I thought was totally amazing at the time. Too much sad computing nostalgia :(
This makes me very sad. Used ICQ throughout Uni in 1999 and met a girl via random chat. We messaged each other for about a year then thought I’d fallen in love — travelled halfway around the world to finally meet her. It didn’t work out but what an experience. RIP ICQ.
Uh oh!
Damn, icq, the memories.
My brain doesn't remember much, but i remember my handle; 376930 - from those early days of whining modems and the sheer excitement of talking to people from all over the world. As a kid it opened up my entire world.
I had no idea that ICQ was still around, but now I'm sad; end of an era. I was more of an AIM guy than ICQ, but I had a tendency to bother creators on Newgrounds, some of which would leave their ICQ numbers, so I would use it occasionally.
There are obvious advantages to newer IM/texting clients, but these old ones were a pretty vital part of my teenage years. The main reason I learned how to type properly was so I could communicate with my friends better on AIM. I spent way too much time figuring out how to use alternative IM clients like Trillian and gAIM so I could avoid advertisements, I spent a lot of time customizing my AIM profile and playing with different fonts, and having friends spam mean with "chain messages". I loved seeing creators from NewGrounds sign on at 4am and still be willing to talk to me.
I'd be a very different person today without AIM and ICQ, for better or worse.
Haven't touched it in over 20 years, and kind of surprised ICQ was even still around, but so many memories from the '90s. Good night, sweet prince.
-- 10923345
420702
Thank you ICQ!
Good old days
My number was 163766, funny how I'll never forget it. Also I've only seen a handful of people with lower numbers than me. I remember when there used to be an ebay market for selling your 6 digit numbers. IIRC they started at 100000? And those were all employees.
I was in elementary back then. Prior to ICQ my online friends and I used PowWow chat if you remember that. It had the funniest robotic voice chat.
edit: Wow PowWow was 1998, I thought it was way earlier than that. http://powwow.jazy.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program) https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5bpjm/that-time-john-mcafee...
edit2: Wtf John McAffee made it
10902983 sez bye, too. I lost the account cos this genius right here chose a male first name as the password.
ICQ later.
Good old times playing those games with strangers and exchanging pictures, then after ICQ we used Skype.
54443480
Goodbye from 7478741
End of an error. I mean Era.
End of an era.
2854684
Not an elite 6 number UIN, but at least on the bottom side of 7 digits.
I think I still remember my ICQ #: 15868571
EDIT: How would I even log in to take a peek? It won't accept my US phone # and my (old, insecure) passwords that I likely used no longer work (and I can't seem to use that number as the login!)
21863839
Yup... still remember it! Crazy!
Sad to see this go.
"Uh oh"
I'm sure most people know this already, but ICQ stood for I Seek You.
I wish they would just open source it, now that it's going to be stopped. Would love to self-host it a bit, just for nostagia
A piece of software that was way ahead of its time. Respect to Mirabilis
I met my first girlfriend on icq
Oh man. It's the end of an era. I still have my ICQ number for 1998 memorized (62125812). I was a bit late the the internet game, ICQ was the first real platform where I met people who, still to this day, I consider friends.
4089460. No idea why that number is stuck in my brain.
259804 - Now I kind of want to see if I can still log in.
1824942
not used in years but very good memories!
"You cannot recover the password" :-(
Oh-oh!
I couldn't find how to check for numbers so I just typed in icq.com/xxxxxxxxx and saw my name. Then I thought well no way I will remember my password, but then I remembered I used the same five letter password all the time back then. And voila it works. Who needs a password manager when you are naive, computers are slow and you need to access memories from times when you weren't overloaded with information.
I will say I don't have many fond memories of it, it was difficult to use it in the days of dial up. Things also changed quicker than today, I think from 2002-2010 we went from ICQ to yahoo to Skype to msn to others and back. But it was my first <3
ICQ was the primary tool for my friends and I to play games online ( quake, doom, starcraft, etc ). Not only with each other but people all around the world. Every time we joined a server our list of icq friends kept increasing. I still remembering coming home from school and immediately checking icq. The mid 90s to early 2000s was a real special time.
I remember setting up a TTS system to announce the names of my friends as they came online.
“Fledermaus is online”
I think after IRC, there was ICQ and MSN. On ICQ, you had a number. ICQ was great. I have fond memories of the spinning flower.
RIP ICQ
Spent a lot of my childhood using it.
The last bastion of the old Internet, end of an era!
I didn't realize it still did. Wow, such memories.
Good old 20854206. Can’t believe I managed to log back in just now. Nothing there though.
lol, still remember my icq number by heart: 5479339
Muscle memory, do your stuff!
43411944
Wow, after all this time I thought everything was gone. But sure enough, my login for worked and they are all there, all my contacts. Farewell from 252972013
Goodbye world! So long! It was a memorable one... Since 20+ year! It'll live on in my memories! Signing off for the one last time! ----------------------- -= 67804916 =- ==End of Transmission== -----------------------
They somehow deleted/deactivated my account several years ago. Not that I used it much in the last 15 years :)
For those who want to experience ICQ once again, there's http://kicq.ru, an unofficial ICQ server that uses some very old version of the protocol so only QIP 2005 and some versions of Jimm work. Adium doesn't work, unfortunately. My number there is 480976.
6447137
I was really surprised when a recovery mechanism was launched many years ago. My account wasnt comprised. It still had the same dumb password from way back -- my first highschool girlfriends name and a number.
This is a thread to ask: are there any good/working tools to process the old databases from ICQ 99/2000 versions? Maybe even the Mac version? I have some old backups I'm sure have ICQ DBs on them and it would be cool to dump the contents.
Uh oh!
Low 6 digits owner. Have long lost access... Made many friends on ICQ. But all good things come to an end.
Though this one actually outlasted my expectations: AOL owned... But why does it mention VK?
Wow, didn't realize it was still out there! Lots of fun chatting with random people from around the world on there.
15574041
664427 - RIP
I hope the last message sent on ICQ will be as poetic as the last message on AIM (according to https://justanman.org/posts/the-last-message-sent-on-aim/)
I remember my UIN but not password. Weird how that works!
The old internet was such a frontier.
While we've undoubtedly gained so much, we did lose something very special.
That’s the end then. 2455876 signing off ;) I even remember my password.
Bye bye WarSheeps
I wonder how many other folks instantly recalled the ICQ notification sound on reading the headline.
Uh oh!
Oh no, since like 1998 I had been using this, though not really for the past 10 years heh. Good bye friend!
Oh man, so many memories... Got ICQ in late 1998, and I remember my UIN as well, suprisingly -- unlike the dozen of mobile phone numbers I had over last 20 years.
Internet back then connected you to people who you'd not meet in everyday life, and ICQ was a new unusual place to discuss anything with them.
It gave you a new view of people you knew. I remember in the last grade at school I had some intimate conversations with a female classmate, which I couldn't imagine doing at school in front of many eyes.
It was a dating and meeting app too: rando people would write to other random people. Although these talks were superficial and today I'd see them disenchanting, back then it was an interesting alternatives to offline sociality.
Then I used it at office work, mostly to appoint dates with girls from another department. At the time, in 2007, it wasn't exclusive anymore, but like a mark of being web-literate, and girls were easier about telling you a UIN rather than a phone.
Then social networks came, and even before mobile integration they were much richer -- all the life went there. Ah, good old days -- make a party, do stupid contests, take photos with a soapbox digital camera, and then pour the entire SD card in the meeting album -- no editing, no removal of closed or red eyed faces, or weird postures or opened mouths. Just let everyone see how fooly they were. And what was different from ICQ was that everybody was aware that everybody was aware. ICQ had no chance.
The last time I opened it under Pidgin on Ubuntu in 2010-2011.
22239414
I remember a few years ago when I logged back in after all those years it asked me to change my password ... because the old one was three letters long, definitely from a different era :)
15203830
Goodbye from 145993830. How do I even remember this after so many years?
My account was taken over with one of the hacks, I remember shaming the person who took it into giving it back to me. 756331 signing off
Goodbye from 9,275,290
677808. RIP old friend.
3383011 – I still remember my ICQ number 20+ years later :)
116633 Good times!
uh oh!
94280666
I wonder how many machine operates it and if there's a GDPR 'backup your data' feature hehe
Can't remember my driver's license number but will never forget 13658022. RIP
uh oh :(
I haven't used ICQ in years, but my heart is still sad to receive this news.
Oh wow, didn't think it was still around! Don't remember my id number any more, but had great fun using centericq over SSH. Simpler, better times. So long and thanks for all the fish!
I actually did a homemade uh-oh for one of my things as an homage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PsNkVAjoGQ
Sad to see it go even if I haven't used it since a 5 digit handle meant something.
Not only is this sad, it makes me feel old. Its just another reminder that the Internet of the late 90s/early 2000s is dead and not coming back. Instead its been replaced with corporate blandness and faux outrage.
Back in the day, messaging was pretty awesome. You could use an app like Pidgin and pretty much talk to anyone no matter what color their bubbles were.
Today, I have to have one app for all the different ways to get ahold of someone. It's pretty annoying, but we did it to ourselves. Yay.
194194984
Terrible, terrible news. So many events in my life are linked to ICQ...
Do we have a chance to save it?
Noooo! Not ICQ! I only haven't used it for 20 years! But it was kinda cool, like AIM. Except why was their sound always "oh-OH?" And why was it called "ICQ"? I heard it was short for "i seek u" but that's kinda dumb, ain't it? innit?
My first thought upon reading this was just to wonder if my account is still somehow active.
I have fond memories of using it, but the end of ICQ doesn't hit me nearly as hard as the end of Geocities did.
End of an era. When I was a little kid ICQ was my first messaging program. It was the first time I spoke to someone over the computer. Even though I have not used it in a long time it gives me feelings of nostalgia.
2476319, got it in 1997 or 1998
1327344!
I still remember my uin and password.
I still miss that “watooo” sound when you received a message.
Good times. Thanks for being part of my first days on the internet. Rest in peace.
4125222
I still remember it but not the pass
219431446 was me :D. No idea why I still remember that.
22861316
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.
16575923
383105.
I can remember an unused IM account from a lifetime ago but not a single ffmpeg flag.
Pretty close to mine. 4367571. Must have registered a month apart.
500122
I had 2589620 ... I have the password, somewhere. :)
666260
Had it for many years then someone “hacked it” and took it. That was the end of it for me.
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.
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?
Yes, yes, just a client, but for me it was the first interface to whole new world, so I will never forget it.
slaps you with a trout
Correct, mIRC is just one of many clients for an IRC protocol.
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.
I'd hope Khaled would open source it if he decides to give it up
mIRC has the same chance of dying as Irssi. As in none.
I have similar sentimental memories of 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 :)
[1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
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.
Oh, did I mix it up with MSN then, or maybe early Skype? Or did this possibly happen after the OSCAR migration?
I vividly remember being amazed by offline delivery in Jabber, so at least one of ICQ or MSN must have not had it for me to even notice.
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
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.
Before we even had “wi-fi!”
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 certainly ran into scammers on ICQ.
Which year ?
5 digits ICQ number is a great achievement
haha... this sounds so familiar ;)
Hard to realise how cultural waves come and go. Humbling
just logged in for the first time in 20 years. actually remembered my ICQ number and password! the contact list didn't seem to survive though