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ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet, or internet of the people if you prefer the term.

After companies started dominating the internet, it was never be the same. We thought that any company would play by our rules, but they poisoned us with their research, gamification, single way information flow, and walled gardens.

This is why I moved to small web.

I miss the old internet dearly.

I lament the loss of the Old Growth Internet as well, but I feel we can never go home again.

>the Old Growth Internet

Nicely coined.

Can you share more on what you mean by moving to the small web?

Google is your friend: https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/ https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/ https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

Another related term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) (NOT web, but similar in spirit - an extended "Gopher"-like protocol)

Why not just answer a question without the “Google is your friend” crap? That’s rude and we’re better than that.

You are absolutely right. I don't see an edit button, but if there was one I would remove it and just add the links without the commentary.

Well done acknowledging it though. That converted a bit of pointless internet anger into a great bit of personal responsibility. Thanks fellow internet user for doing your part today to make the net a better place.

It was commercial, wasn't it? And only worked on Windows? IRC was the open alternative.

I had a Linux ICQ client in 1997/1998.

With the built-in option to “hijack account”, when sending a password longer than 8 characters would log you in, but official clients capped you at 8 characters.

I had to recompile some cmd line one from the linux sources to work from my home directory on my universities unix system ~2000. Back before everyone in college had laptops.

This was the 90s, so I guess reverse engineering the protocols was simple. There were even Amiga clients of it, like stricq.

It was the OSCAR protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol

> ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet

It was proprietary client software released in 1996 and bought by AOL two years later.

It relies on a service operated by a single party, which is now sunsetting it.

According to the Wikipedia article, when ICQ was under AOL's stewardship, "AOL pursued an aggressive policy regarding alternative ("unauthorized") ICQ clients."

The article details all the tactics that AOL implemented in the service to break unofficial clients.

I don't see where the word "democratic" connects with ICQ.

If it still feels more democratic than modern chat apps then there is something deeply wrong with how things evolve.

That is correct but it was still more open than what we have now with the current services. 3rd party clients and multi-protocol messengers we don't have at all anymore.

Isn't that what Beeper or Ferdium are doing? And there's still libpurple/Pidgin.

[1] https://www.beeper.com/

[2] https://ferdium.org/

Interesting, need to check but so far the modern methods of multi protocol messaging was mostly just aggregating the web UIs of the various services in a single application (read: like a web browser)

Pidgin, Miranda, Adium are the things I was referring to - would be cool if I could use them for whatsapp, signal, gmail chat/hangouts but I don‘ think thats possible. Happy to get corrected here.

https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Pro... lists all of them.

We're still hard at work trying to get support for new chat features in Pidgin. You can find our quarterly updates here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUmrAdJiXFMVZXy5DIrL8...

You missed the point. The point wasn't the nature of the tool itself. Anyone could join, and one could chat with anyone. It was used "by the people" and not curated by corps.

Pretty sure every large-scale chat app that exists is used "by the people"? What are you actually trying to say?

Currently it's used "by the customer", or worse, "by the data suppliers".

ICQ was not "curated" by a corporation; it was produced and operated by one from scratch.

The present-day, mainstream, proprietary chat systems are open to anyone to join and chat with anyone.

Most of whatever restrictions they have are necessitated by spam. Allowing new members to immediately post unlimited amounts of material into any chat room or any other member's inbox is a bad idea, even in an open-source, federated chat system.

Curated referring to content.

>ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet, or internet of the people if you prefer the term.

That's IRC.

> That's IRC.

IRC is the other one, not the only one. However, Discord is eating its lunch in these days, sadly.

I can’t imagine that the typical IRC user has any interest in Discord. They are wildly different in every conceivable way.

Unfortunately projects are increasingly using Discord or Slack instead of IRC.

When Discord gets closed, let's see how the projects will manage the loss.

It gets worse: for some projects I’ve been interested in, the docs are terribly incomplete and when you ask - you are told to ask in the discord

That’s horrific. I guess every generation gets to re-learn the mistakes of the past.

I’ve spent the last couple of days finding random GitHub and Gitlab projects that use a certain library/project to use as “documentation” in lieu of joining the discord.

Guess what? Most of them are abandoned and have similar bugs that are entirely down to some shit being completely undocumented :)

How can we oppose to this? At least open source projects should use open source communication tools.

You can make sure your own projects use such tools.

> At least open source projects should use open source communication tools

I strongly agree.

I think there are a few steps the community could take.

• Promote awareness of this, put it in licence agreements or contributor guidelines.

• Document how to find and how to use FOSS comms tools.

• Pidgin is the best we have for now. It needs an update, so the package includes as many protocol connectors as possible as standard, together with docs how to enable and use them. Getting away from crappy web apps embedded in Electron is pretty important, especially for bringing xBSD and so on on board.

• A corresponding update for Adium would be good, too.

A few years ago I worked for a major Linux vendor and I had Pidgin talking to IRC, Rocket.chat, Slack, Telegram, Skype, Google $CHAT_NAME_OF_THE_MONTH, and all my other services... but it took considerable manual effort.

The result was working multiprotocol chat in about 10% of the RAM usage of the Franz Electron client.

We're working hard on that update.. But volunteers only have so much time, but hopefully we'll have an alpha soon (tm).

On Adium? Really? Great to hear that. I was extremely fond of Adium, a decade ago.

On Pidgin? Cool. I am surprised but I managed to get Pidgin working on macOS via Brew yesterday, which automatically installed a recent version of WINE, to my considerable surprise.

It wouldn't connect to anything and I couldn't find where, in one OS's emulated filesystem on top of my real OS's rather complex filesystem, I could put plugins, but hey, it started and ran and that's quite impressive.

Given that Gtk apps such as Geany manage to run on macOS, I thought a native Unix port of Pidgin would be an easier effort than the Windows one, but hey.

Last I checked the homebrew version of pidgin was native...

Really? I got a Windows binary and Wine Stable installed automatically as a dependency. Monterey, on x86.

"The other one"?

Yes, "The other one". IRC and ICQ was equal in its use in my circles and both were indispensable for what they did. Plus, we all used alternative clients too.

One of the last living artifacts of the internet that was, the internet that could have been.

As others have pointed out, our fond memories of the Old Internet being "democratic" may be a little off.

But. I think it's fair to say it felt more free, it had a high barrier of technical entry, which filtered out most of the public, and there was no craven race to monetize and enshitify absolutely every single of our interactions.

Mostly because corporations were in the process of figuring out how to do all that with this new Internet thing.

First thought: I had assumed ICQ was long dead. It seemed impossible anything from that era could still be running. IRC is of course, through the grace of an ecosystem, but it is a tiny fraction of what it was.

Second thought: how do people randomly connect to talk now? Comments sections mostly? I have long ago stopped seeking new connections of any variety.

discord servers

I hate those so much...

"servers"

I don't think anybody actually cares, but I resent discord for this terminology.

I hate it as well, mostly for the fact that people don't understand how Matrix is decentralized. They think "join matrix.org and create a space" as the same as "creating their own server".

Life is hard.

Most of us do, I think. Then again, what would you label them as? A space? A domain?

Yahoo called them "groups".

Room.

In the API they're referred to as a `guild`

there is an entire generation conditioned to call any group chat or instance a “server” and the pedant in me absolutely wants to scream every time I hear it

I believe the origin, however, was to help it clearly and directly compete with teamspeak or mumble at the time it launched. You would actually have to invest in some sort of hosted server for your group, so the name made sense as a way to help people visualize how discord worked. It’s definitely a relic at this point though.

Relic isn't the word. They've changed/expanded the meaning of the term.

If we’re doing pedantry Olympics then the definition of server:

“a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network”

Seems like it could apply to a discord group. The centralized resource being chat data.

Now you know how my dad feels about the terms "engineer" and "software architect" being used for software developers.

The random.connection thing: post comments on Reddit. I'd suggest discord, too, but its not quite the same as ICQ was in terms.of random connections.

Is IRC a tiny fraction of what it was? As a percentage of internet traffic sure, but has the population of IRC users actually declined?

I’m pretty sure IRC has continued to grow in obscurity, much like Gopher, which, last I checked, was also at an all-time peak and growing steadily but slowly.

The numbers here https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php are much lower than what I remember from twenty years ago, and the Internet Archive seems to support this: https://web.archive.org/web/20060902133725/http://irc.netspl...

I don't think IRC is one of those technologies whose usage count in absolute terms is at an all-time high today. It wasn't exactly mainstream in the early 2000s, but it still had lots of users.

Thanks, that’s interesting info. I think you might be underestmating this part though:

“Here you see the 100 largest and most popular IRC networks that take part in netsplit.de's comparison, but please consider that there are still some big IRC networks that are out of competition"

Well it's being kept alive in the DoD as "tactical chat" [1]. Although the article is from 2015, watchstanders do still use it today.

[1] https://publicintelligence.net/tactical-chat/

I met one of my best friends randomly on Reddit, so there.

> how do people randomly connect to talk now?

Just getting online used to place you in a small enough pool that making connections was easy -- the fact that you were online in the first place gave you something in common.

Any single online platform has far too many users (and spammers, bots, trolls, grifters, etc.) to make it a good place to meet friends.

Maybe IRC would be a good idea.

I was under the impression that ICQ turned off when AIM did.,

Nope. AOL sold it off in 2010.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...

In one of those random connections, I met my wife through ICQ.

Nice. I just remembered my 8 digit login and password and indeed, my wife also had an account back somewhere in 2005-2008. (I brought here there but didn't meet her there though)

While it had it’s troubles and closed recently, omegle was a modern way for people to connect randomly.

That's for sure.

Whatsapp in non US world

WhatsApp is European much more than it is American. Most Americans are just using SMS like cave people.

The comment you replied to is more accurate, as WhatsApp is huge in multiple continents not just in Europe (just not as big in North America as you both point out). For example it's big in South America (and I think Central America too?)

Asia too. Australia too. So again it's the Fahrenheit users being different...

Edit: I looked it up, maybe not Australia...

"Asia too"

Hmm. China? No -- WeChat. Japan? No -- Line. Korea? No -- KaoKao.

Your logic is missing a couple steps.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/whatsapp-...

WhatsApp and FB Messenger are equally popular in Australia.

I'd pre pandemic FB Messenger was definitely more popular but there's been a gradual but noticible shift to WhatsApp since.

I thought in India too, used for payments or something? I remember it's used widely in many places

Yes - I think if you pick a country at random it's more likely to have WhatsApp high on the list of communication tools than not, albeit with some of the biggest countries like China also joining the US in being exceptions).

How much of that due to sms historically being free in the US but cost per-message elsewhere?

That’s definitely the main reason.

It’s also why, briefly, (2008-2010 ish I believe) blackberry phones were the ones kids wanted because they could use blackberry messaging for free without using up their sms credits.

WhatsApp is bundled/zero-rated with cellphones, or cellular network access, if I understand the billboards in South America correctly.

Nope. We use iMessage because we can afford iPhones.

In Europe even iPhone users will preferentially use WhatsApp in my experience.

I have exactly one contact who prefers iMessage over WhatsApp or Signal. The majority use WhatsApp, with Signal being a growing second.

Telegram comes in third place - but mostly that’s used for following “feeds”

This new (and to be euthanised) ICQ isn't the one with the numeric username. Out of curiosity I did (re-)register a few years ago, IIRC it used the user's phone number as the username.

I am still able to log in with my UIN and it has my contact list from several lifetimes ago. Even some online contacts.

ICQ was bought by... uhh Russians? Israelis? Something like that... and was changed several times what it actually is; when I tried it recently, it was just a WhatsApp clone; they even removed all the old ICQ number accounts.

Russians, given the VK app plug in the announcement.

Yes, ICQ was bought by Russians in 2010, and it was already dying at that time.

I'm actually kinda bummed to hear that. I logged in sometime in the past few years and was pleasantly surprised to see my number from the 90s still worked. Moot point now if the whole thing is being shut down anyways, I guess.

I could not be more with you on this.

ICQ. Geocities (and even some of its clones). I even have fond memories of early yahoo chat such as it was.

The open Internet and the quirky services that made it up was a miraculous, wonderful thing back then. It’s heartbreaking to think of what it’s become since.

I sometimes wonder if there’s a way back to an Internet that resembles the one we had, but all people seem to care about now are celebrities on InstaTikTokTube.

In terms of what you said about ICQ and the sounds (totally agree btw), I used DarkSky for years before it got axed and I miss its rain warning sound horribly.

Yahoo games man

> when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN

MSN wasn't a worse alternative to ICQ, MSN was faster and came with Windows, making it both easier to keep running at the background on the weak hardware of the time (i remember launching ICQ and waiting waiting waiting at the splash screen with the rotating petal colors and then the main UI was a mess of buttons, icons and all sorts of bloat) and it was just easier to get into.

ICQ did release ICQ Lite which was lighter but by then that was too late - and even that couldn't combat MSN coming bundled with Windows, meaning that people who didn't have any IM suddenly now had one.

At some point I had MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and irc and pidgn came to save me.

There were also cool places to hang out like Yahoo Games or a few of the location based chat apps that were fun to connect to strangers and just chat.

Discord is so walled garden it's awful in this respect.

I also miss the VRML world builders like CyberTown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown

then you could try pidgin to connect them all from one app

Pidgin was pretty awesome, though its underlying library was so riddled with vulnerabilities…

I greatly enjoyed how with XMPP’s in-band registration you could do things like give each contact a unique XMPP address, only to be used with them. You could have unlimited (well, I never hit a limit) accounts, across a load of servers, proxies per account, unique OTR keys per account, etc.

I don’t think the UI has really been surpassed either, tbh. I really wish someone would do a modern rewrite of Pidgin in some memory safe language.

Responsibly disclosing security issues is paramount to software security. See https://pidgin.im/about/security/advisories/ for a full break down.

That said, the vulnerabilities in "libpurple" were way over hyped by someone who rightfully got kicked out of the security community. Most of those vulnerabilities were in fact in protocol implementations that are plug-ins to libpurple and not libpurple itself. I know it's a technicality, but hearing this blatant lie get repeated for over a decade is exhausting.

Totally remember the switch to MSN. You are entirely correct. It was the beginning of the end.-

(I seem to recall MSN having some killer feature or another that made people switch. Or just critical Maas, with Windows.)

I remember there being doubters like [1]:

> If you want to chat with people, you have to go where they are, and ICQ and AOL have the most people by far. Chances are, your friends are using one of those services, not one of the smaller ones like MSN Instant Messenger. With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-...

Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.

This reminded me of my Macintosh System 7 days. My CPU was not fast enough to decode MP3s so I convert them to WAVs but my 80MB HDD only had space for about two WAVs at any given time.

ICQ was nice but everyone moved on to Yahoo Messenger. That was the bomb. Truly unbelievable Yahoo didn't capitalize on that. Everyone used it.

I don't think everyone did. Maybe it's local to your circle of contacts. From what I remember yahoo barely made a dent here in Australia.

It was absolutely based on location.

after ICQ, from what I remember AOL Messenger was the dominant force in the US, MSN was very popular in many countries, but across Asia, Middle East, and many Eastern European countries, Yahoo Messenger was the de facto standard.

Not dissimilar to the situation we have today with WhatsApp and WeChat and iMessage. Except back then you could use pidgin or trillian as multi protocol clients which solved the issue. Somehow, we have regressed so much in this area in the last 20 years.

The reason no one needs a multiprotocol client now is we all have instant, intuitive multiprotocol devices in our pocket at all times. That's what's changed in the last 20 years.

Pretty sure everyone went to msn mainly because you could use any image as emoji. Then the nightmare of one emoji per letter begun

It was MSN messenger that came preinstalled with any new pc that slowly killed it, because a lot of people got their first computer in that period and thus only knew the Microsoft one. ICQ users slowly started to have a secondary MSN Messenger account (the days of Trillian) but that was it, once people have 2 messengers apps AND most of their friends are on the new one, they just slowly abandonned the one with less contacts.

I personnally didn't even knew there was a Yahoo issued Messenger until this comment.

MSN Messenger was like AOL/Yahoo but in Europe.

This resonates a lot. When MSN become the norm was a big hit, then Windows Live and many people scattered around, left was Facebook but now only with IRL friends. Most alternatives since ICQ have been worse.

> Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN.

It wasn't so much the platform that set ICQ apart, it was the time in which it was born into. In the late 90s and early 00s, the internet was still an unchartered 'No Man's Land'. Internet access was difficult and scarce, and people approached it with curiosity and savor. Now the internet is taken for granted, and anonymously connecting to strangers so unremarkable, that it is seen as an excess that can be squandered in mindless and fleeting argument and opposition.

If there was an inflection point, I'd say it was around the nascent rise of Facebook. Connecting to familiars became the default, and also enough, that connecting to strangers didn't hold as much allure as competing to make your life look more appealing within your peer group.

About your last paragraph: The key to me about Facebook, and eventually, Instagram, the visual is simply more powerful to humans than written words. This is why people started chasing fame with good looks as soon as the Internet "went visual".

I had a thought last week: When I was in high school (very early Internet years), older people told me the "popular" people will fade away when you go to university. For most part, in my experience, this was true. I realised last week that visual social media allows "high school popular people" (conventionally attractive, for the most part) to stay that way forever. When you look at most social media influencers, there isn't very much special about them, except them seem like the type of person who was popular in high school. For most normies, that is enough to give them more attention than someone else.

Well I'd say that Instagram was yet another inflection point, where relationships with strangers returned in parasocial many-to-one form, in place of the one-on-one intimacy afforded by ICQ.

At the time of ICQ, chat programs were the sole means of discovering and connecting to people, and allowed people to connect to strangers based on location. I made real life friends, who I met in person on ICQ. I suppose this kind of connection might still happening on game servers and Discord servers, but certainly, it isn't the dominant mode.

As for Facebook being 'visual': Facebook in it's earlier incarnations was just status updates, and mobile phone cameras were still pretty clunky (or non-existant). Instagram took off because it's filters turned otherwise ugly low-fidelity photos into something appealing.

To me, "parasocial" is the very defintion of popular _after_ high school

Parasocial has very specific meaning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

It's just a scale thing. Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile. With mobile the internet became huge, absolutely massive, and the idea of a shared culture on the internet basically broke down. I'm pretty sure the average Discord server is bigger than the top 5 ICQ chatrooms combined. The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person (or someone who was on their way to becoming a Western upper-middle class college-educated person) as that was the only person who had the money, time, and education to afford the peripherals (home PCs, modems, telecoms costs, internet plans.)

> 5 ICQ chatrooms combined

Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. It was purely chat with the ability to discover other users around the world. It was one to one, not many to many, and there was no server bubble to restrict to a particular special interest.

> The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person

Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end. A lot of the people I talked to on ICQ were from ‘poorer’ countries. Chat wasn’t really demanding on bandwidth

> Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile.

The first smart phones were definitely more expensive than the cheapest PCs, but when they did get affordable in the global south around the early-mid 2010s, ICQ was long dead

> It's just a scale thing.

More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.

‘Social media’ was also a change in mode from relating to strangers to connecting to people we already know. But I don’t ascribe causation to Facebook specifically, it was just with enough time and enough scale (as you mention) that ‘social media’ was inevitable. Prior to Facebook I’d used services like MySpace, Bebo, and Quickdot, that have all since faded from view. We were searching for what Facebook came to be – a low effort way to share our experience with people we already know

> Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms.

My wires crossed a bit with AIM chat which I used around the same time. I only got on IRC later because I was too young to be interested in the things folks talked about on IRC at that age.

> Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end.

Basically someone with the ability to pay for Internet and pay for the phone time. Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable) prices differed but it was definitely not something people in the hood or from Asian countries outside Japan and Taiwan could justify spending money on.

> More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.

100%. I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph when the ability to contact anyone "anywhere" in the wealthy world became a lot easier and professional communications stopped being optimistic and instead expected.

> Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable)

Facebook era was late 00s, and didn't hit full stride globally until early 10s. By this point internet access was available to 1 in 4 people. Scale—in meaningful distinction to 'the old web'—had well and truly already arrived. The average Joe and Jane were using the internet.

https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users

> I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph

As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "The medium is the message". He also coined the term 'information overload' in the 60s when talking about the uptake of radio and television. Ever since the printing press, regular people have been gaining access to information at increasing volume, and not only those of means. However, the particular medium of the internet changed the means of accessing, generating and interacting with information and communicating other people. What McLuhan was pointing out by "The medium is the message" is that every medium has its own flavor, and it's own particular impact on society.

And for the internet it hasn't just been one impact: the rise of email and mailing lists, chat applications, internet-wide keyword search, social media, smartphones and apps, dating apps, AirBnB, Uber.. the fabric of social order is being disrupted again and again by the internet in a manner exceptional to other media. Sometimes it's even hard to see what changes have taken place. To take one example, the rise of dating apps has had a real impact on the profits and kinds of late night venues.

So, to bring back to my earlier point, social media had an impact that changed how we communicate. It was certainly very visible to me at the time. I think in particular with ICQ, it provided a means for strangers to meet and fostered connections outside of our respective bubbles, and for that I remember it fondly, and also worry a bit more about our world as it becomes more fragmented and isolated along social borders.

> The sounds it made

To this day, my text notifications ring "hey ho"

I set it up as a specific notification for my best friend with whom I used to chat over ICQ back in the late nineties/early twothousands,

>And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings.

The longing for Ostalgie was based on things being easier and basic needs met more easily than in the cut throat "free market" environment that followed

to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN

I get it, and wholly agree.

> It was rather a feeling that perhaps other Brazilians will share: a longing, saudade, for the simpler (yes) but better and more poetic 90s

I am from Argentina, and share your same feelings.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Everybody in Germany used ICQ. MSN and ICQ were concurrently popular in different regions. Everybody I knew from the US or other English-speaking parts of the world used MSN. There was no mass move from ICQ to MSN that lead to ICQ's demise, they basically both died at the same time when Facebook came out to the general public.

That’s what happened in my network in canada. It was ICQ first, then MSN became popular while Hotmail was becoming popular and people moved away from icq to msn. Once the switch happened, Icq disappeared very quickly.

Wasn't icq the client where to send messages, you had to use alt+i? That alone was the worst possible ux choice for a chat client

Wat?

I don’t remember that but I do remember a lot about the way messaging worked on it to be kind of clunky by modern messaging standards. At least early on I don’t think you saw messages you received in context of the conversation? That’s a distinct memory I have.