ICQ will stop working on June 26. It’s encouraging users to migrate to a messaging app from Russia-based VK, its parent company.
I stopped using ICQ in the very early 00s. I didn’t know anything of it still remained.
I met my wife on ICQ. I had random chat turned on and she said, “Hello.” That was a long time ago
I met your wife there too.
So what?
We all did.
asl?
She told me she talked to a guy who just wanted to talk about WoW and his favourite Linux distro. She gave up when he didn’t make a move and decided to look for a real man. Was that you?
Would have been WoW and Star Trek if it was me.
Ah.
🤣
Is she single?
Decapitated. Whole big thing. We had a funeral for a bird.
Did she ever meet anyone interesting doing that?
Jk, of course. It was just too good of a setup to ignore.
Not as far as I know.
Me too. I hope they’re different people
My standard reply was “hailing frequencies open.” Needless to say it was the opening line that let multiple women know that I was single. Surprisingly it had a 100% success rate. I was the best nerd.
Did that line get you laid a lot?
The data is conflicting. I think they had already made up their mind on that topic before messaging me. My reply just reinforced their decision. It’s hard to separate causation and correlation in that case.
Did you wait until your wedding night to cyber for the first time?
Uh…no. It was all about sex. The whole getting married thing was an accident.
And now you have grandchildren?
Not yet. Our son isn’t quite 16 and our daughter is 18 and into girls. It may take a few years yet.
Uh oh!
*My favorite random icq sound finding it’s way into music https://youtu.be/nZHFy3YfagU
I hear you
That’s what my wife said when I told her.
ICQ was still on?
Right?! Like it wasn’t already shutdown. The news is that it was still operational!
Edit: grammar
I know, right? ICQ managed to survive when MSN, Yahoo and AIM were all killed by Facebook Messenger?
Shit I wished I’d known
ICQ was still around? I thought it died ages ago!
#Uh-Oh!
ICQ may be going away but that message sound effect will continue living rent free in my brain until I’m dead.
I’ve heard that exact sound used on some computers (lottery maybe?) in gas stations in the US. I’m not sure why they picked that exact sound, but it’s definitely distinct and recognizable.
Okay, can we all acknowledge that ICQ died when they nuked pretty much all of the accounts for no good reason?
While it’s true it’s shutting down, it was effectively dead for years. This is just the death rattle.
ICQ died the day they were bought by AOL.
TIL: ICQ was still around
Yeah I stopped around the same time. But I didn’t know they were run by VK. That’s interesting.
They were acquired recently.
Mirabilis created ICQ. AOL bought Mirabilis in 1998. Russian investor DST (which soon became Mail.ru and later VK) bought ICQ from AOL in 2010, probably because Russians were among the few nationalities still using it. Russians were over 25% of the hits, and it was the biggest instant messenger in Russia at the time. They also own VKontakte, hence why they’re directing people there.
I remember downloading almost the complete catalogue of Sega Dreamcast games through ICQ, along with plenty of rooms where “A/S/L?” was a common greeting.
Old enough/yes please/anywhere you’d like
Icq was bought a while ago and the buyer nuked the original user database. Not long ago I found my login info saved on an old zip drive and tried it. Was hoping my old buddies might still be there, hahahah.
Nope, icq as most remember it was toast maybe a decade ago.
I wonder how many old accounts I have from my childhood floating around, long forgotten, created well before the days of using a password manager
I met an interesting Argentinian girl through ICQ. A co-worker ended up getting their inbox filled with large attachments from an overseas office with fast internet. We were still on dial-up. We just had pop3 access, no online front end. I stayed in the office over night to download the files so the connection wouldn’t be interrupted by someone else accessing the line. To pass the time, I downloaded ICQ and started chatting with the Argentinian girl. She introduced me to this song.
Great memories.
The Song is quite fitting for an overnight shift in an office :D
Uh oh
That used to scare the crap out of me when I had the volume up and wasn’t expecting a message!
Meanwhile IRC and Usenet are still doing fine.
Those are protocols, so the servers/services that run than can come and go. XMPP, which was at least inspired by ICQ, will probably be around forever, similarly.
How do you people remember your ICQ numbers? I don’t remember what I did last week half the time.
1646590
For some reason, I never used the “save login info” feature as a teen, I didn’t trust that it was safe, so I typed it every time. Hundreds, if not thousands of times over the years. So even after 15 years or so of not using it, I still remember.
I am autistic.
Seriously, though, diagnosed autistic and I remember numbers exceptionally well.
- ICQ number 6725571
- Pi to 260 decimal places
- My ex-wife’s driver’s license number
- My 11-digit Blockbuster employee numbers from the two stores I used to work at
- The nine-digit employee numbers of a few employees under me from when I worked at Six Flags in 1994
For some reason short strings of digits have always stuck really well in my memory. I still remember my high school locker combos and every phone number I’ve ever had.
813-823-6615 was my childhood number until I was 10. My mom sang it to us. Never thought to remember my lock code. 0-31-10.
I taught my kids our address and my telephone number through songs when they were little. Music makes learning abstract things like that way easier. I teach the quadratic formula wihh a song to my Algebra students every year.
