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smacks forehead

I seek you. I don't think I ever got that. And it was my primary messaging platform for a long time - I grudgingly made the move to AIM sometime around 2002. I felt that ICQ allowed more in-depth conversations; IM was much more call-and-response.

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CQ has been used for over a century as a call by radio operators (mostly in Morse code, where it's encoded as -.-. --.-). It's a general call that invites any operators that receive it to respond to you.

It actually originated from the French word sécurité, but in English-language countries it was quickly backronym'd to become an abbreviation of "seek you".

There were a few applications that had names along those lines during that "era": ICQ, CUSeeMe (video chat), and so on.

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