Why? Were there no chat history in those tools?
Couldn't you just sign off if you had other things to do, and answer later in the same conversation?
That was around the good old times when we argued whether utf-8 posts are acceptable, whether top-posters deserve life sentences, and other very important things...
I guess turning off online status completely is the way to go. Maybe it should be off by default. What's the point of showing it if the person can answer anyway when he has the time?
But in another sense, they weren't, as I would often elect to set my status across my services as Away in order to curb the expectations of some people who were particularly in need of attention.
I guess that part hasn't changed, though. Just today I had to explicitly set boundaries with someone about how often they can realistically expect to command my attention away from my task at hand and toward my phone.
Sort of, but back then the expectations were different. It would have been uncommon, and sometimes impolite, to come back to a conversation several hours or minutes later as if there was no official end.
Feels weird now but having lived in the original chat room era, in which our parents' phone calls interrupted our internet connection, it was pretty different back then.