ICQ was cool, but at the time it was just another chat service that I used through Trillian. I really miss Trillian these days
Nowadays, you have to jump through hoops to get even a few of the messaging services in one program, it's clunky and barely works, and you'd be breaking terms of service of half of them. Also, it would break anyway in a week or two, because the service owner changed something in the proprietary protocol.
Fortunately, with Matrix and a few other pioneers, it's getting better again, but in the meantime, there is an entire generation used to having their communication hamstrung by american corporations.
I guess what I’m saying is, things sucked just as much then as they do now. Maybe more! Sigh.
IRC was of course always open, but that's kind of orthogonal to this discussion as it never really had any traction with the general public the way AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, etc. did.
Also, users weren't yet conditioned to expect proprietary chat apps and nothing else back then. Recently, I installed a small family Matrix server, for chatting and sharing photos. I had one heck of a time explaining that the client app (Riot) is named differently from the protocol (Matrix). And I'm glad I did not have to explain why the server software has yet another name (Synapse).
(In the end, I went with comparison to e-mail, which has different clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. That seems to have lit some overhead lightbulbs. :) )
Now not only do I have a million chat apps again, but they're almost all a godawful resource hungry non-native UX disaster. :(