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Comment by tehwebguy | Hacker News Reader

AOL/AIM away messages were the original social media status update for my generation (at least in my social circle).

So much drama went down in those short little notes.

This is spot on. I was a freshman in college when AIM was at its peak, just as Ethernet was available in the dorms for always-on Internet access. AIM is how I learned to type. It was the original social network for the masses.

Honestly, I had no idea it was still operating.

AOL/AIM Buddy Info were the original social media profiles for my generation.

So much time wasted right-clicking on a user name and going to "Show Info"...

In the book Hatching Twitter, AIM status updates were cited as a major point of inspiration for Twitter.

Agreed... it really paved the way for ambiguous and vague Facebook statuses and tweets.

It was text messaging before everyone had a computer in their pockets.

Not SMS? Funny how quickly the iPhone has erased the memory of earlier mobile technology. SMS is not only where the term text messaging comes from, but it's older than AIM, older than MSN, older than ICQ.

SMS was (and is) limited to 160 characters and costs you money to send each one. Not comparable to AIM.

SMS had the dubious distinction of being the most expensive way to send data outside of non-commercial satellite and exotic military technologies. I can remember fees of $.35 for 160 7-bit characters worth of data, using bandwidth that was otherwise just going to waste. Carriers got so greedy with SMS.

That comes to about $2.1 million per gigabyte. But it's also a bit of an unfair comparison since one user consumes far less bandwidth using SMS vs general data.

> Not SMS? Funny how quickly the iPhone has erased the memory of earlier mobile technology.

Not sure that's true. I used AIM before I had a cell phone (and therefore SMS). While the technology for SMS has been around since the early 90's it really didn't get widespread adoption in the US until the early to mid 00's.

For some SMS may pre-date AIM, but I don't believe that is true for the majority.

It's a cultural thing. When I first started importing phones from overseas to the U.S., I showed a bunch of people at a party how cool it was that I could get e-mail and text messages on my phone. This was 1999.

The majority of the people didn't know what e-mail was, though they did have AOL.

Most knew about text messaging, but laughed at the idea of T9-ing a message to someone for 35¢, when you could just call them and talk to them for free.

I think that is the root of the US/EU divergence on text messaging. Because Europeans at the time had to pay for every call, inbound or outbound, text messaging was cheaper than talking. For Americans, it was the other way around. So each followed the path that was least expensive.

In 1999 people didn’t know what email was? How old were these people? Honest question. I’m extremely surprised by this claim.

You've Got Mail came out in 1998 and it was a box office hit.

People knew what email was for several years before that.

But "You've Got Mail" wasn't about e-mail. It was about AOL.

Remember it took years for people to realize that there was more out there than just AOL.

This was a group of about 30 people in their 20's and 30's, with maybe five or so in their 40's.

Average, every-day retail workers mostly. In a mid-sized city.

I know the date is right because I only lived there one year.

When I was in Germany in '99, the calling party paid for phone calls. Incoming was free. I don't know what an SMS cost but it was reliable across carriers and borders.

When I moved back to the US in '01, SMS was free. If your phone and carrier supported it. If you sent an SMS to someone on a different carrier, in another country, or on a phone from last year, they probably wouldn't get it. When all these issues were solved and SMS usage started to explode, then the carriers decided to go for the money-grab... which was dumb and probably the direct impetus for iMessage.

Ya I remember reading in like 2005 that texting was taking off in Europe, and wondering when it would become popular in the US.

I'm guessing the other responders might be from other countries. SMS was THE thing when I was younger (early 2000s) way before AIM, ICQ or anything else. Mainly because not everyone had a computer, but everyone had a cell phone.

And then when mobile data became all the rage, everyone I know just installed ICQ on their phone because the data transfer for ICQ was less than the cost of an SMS.

I grew up in Europe and when I got to the US, I was surprised to see most of my classmates either without a phone or just getting one. I got my first cell phone when I was nine? Maybe eight? Most of my classmates got their by the age of twelve. In the US, my classmates got their phones when they were 14 or 16 or even older; however, they had ready access to a computer at all times, I didn't have that back in Europe.

European too, and had opposite experience: had access to internet quite young (around 8-9 years old I was already starting to bother my parents so that I could play on battle.net a bit and this meant they coudldn't receive phone calls! but it was max 20h of internet per months... until AOL and their wonderful unlimited dial-up of course). However I didn't get a cell phone until 15.

When I was in sixth and seventh grade most of the communications with my classmates were through AIM. Then it was MSN, then facebook...

My school (in the US) was very striated into ethnic groups. The Hispanic kids were really into MSN, the white kids used AIM, and the black kids used SMS.

In the late 1990s when I used AIM, SMS still cost $0.25/message, and few of my friends had any cell phone, let alone one capable of texting.

Text messaging = SMS for many people in the US. The term SMS has never been used much by consumers here, that I have heard. People call it texting. It has only been popular enough to be useful since about 2002-2005, which is after the glory days of ICQ for me.

I recall AIM implemented a feature where you could add contacts by cell number (instead of screen name) and then it would send the AIM messages as texts

That's how Aim is now for me. The only people logged in for the past couple of years are people who's messages forward to their texts.

It is certainly true that SMS predated it, but in the US SMS was very limited at the time. The cost and mediocre phone keyboards kept its use down, and, of course, it wasn't practically usable from PCs.

Ironically, SMS probably replaced AIM for a lot of people as a lot of these limitations started to fall away.

AOL had instant messages back when they were still a Commodore 64 bulletin board in the 80s.

No. Ironically, you're probably not old enough. AIM predated any meaningful adoption of SMS in the US by a long time. In the 90s, I was one of the youngest to carry a cell phone (13) -- I wasn't rich either, just a nerd. In the mid to late 90s that was really the nadir of cheap cell phone deals, you could get a phone for a penny and the monthly service for $15-20 for month if you paid $0.15 per minute or so. No SMS though, the phone didn't even support it (That was an all analog AMPS phone - The next year I got a shitty CDMA phone, but still no SMS).

I didn't have a text capable phone until after 2000.

Meanwhile, AIM well I carried the same ID since 1994 or so.

I didn't get a cell phone until I think 2005. By that time, I had been using ICQ and AIM for over 5 years.

SMS may have existed before ICQ/AIM/etc, but it didn't get used frequently until the mid 00's.

I recall having AIM before I had a cell phone. Particularly since IM over AIM was free, and cell phone companies were still charging people for each SMS message in those days - I want to think it was something ridiculous, like a nickel an SMS.

I'm probably a little older. We had dot plan files.

Same. I remember being in the college dorms and hearing all the AIM notification sounds all up and down the hallway. In the summer when everyone had their windows open you could hear it all over the quad.

Aim was definitely the original social network. MSN messenger had its time too.

Very true. It was the finger/.plan for the masses.

Kids these days with their AIM Away Messages.

In my days, we had to "finger" people their .project/.plan files in VAX/VMS & Unix systems.

OK, I can't resist. Time for a story.

Once upon a time when the net was still new, a friend of mine (then a Unix newbie) was trying to catch up with another friends' current status. Unfortunately this other colleague had quite a lot of info in their .plan, and so many lines and lines of text scrolled by too fast for my friend to read.

Needing a reminder about the syntax of Unix pipes and the "less" command, she turns to the person next to her in the computer lab and asks, "When you're fingering someone, how do you make it go slow?"

This poor hapless bystander gives her an absolutely horrified look, backs away slowly, and makes some excuse for a hasty exit.

It was only sometime later that my friend realized what she'd asked... :)

And that system wasted insane amounts of electricity since each user needed to leave their computer on 24/7. Say what you will about Facebook, but allowing people to leave their computer in sleep mode at night has been an enormous contribution that Zuck has made the world.

We have moved to low power mobile phones that are always on anyhow, so those days would be over regardless.

And, are you sure that facebook doesn't consume even more power with whole data centers fir storage, analysis and serving of mountains of trivial data, all to sell more ads?

Did many folks feel forced to do that due to AIM? For those of us in households with one phone line, we couldn't even be online 24/7 even if we wanted to. I had no problem turning off the computer at many times of day and simply being "offline"..

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