After twenty years, they are finally killing AOL Instant Messenger on December 20th.
Damn, I feel old.
(Subject line initially read “RIP AIM,” but I guess there’s a filter that prevents subject lines from being in all caps.)
I liked it while it was here. Good-bye AIM.
I remember when I first started using it - my senior year in high school. My friends and I immediately ended up figuring out how to get in trouble using the thing. Actually some of my friends’ parents managed to get in trouble too, and got divorced over sexychat!
AIM was my lifeline in college. I ran to the computer lab every night to chat with any of my friends who were around (it wasn’t common to have a computer in your room at this point!)
I’ve used AIM steadily for 20 years. I used it for my business right out of college, even when my business partner and I were sitting next to each other in the same room.
I’m down to just 2 friends who use it now (or who use chat apps at all) - this morning I got both of them to switch to GTalk and I went there too. We chat during the day at work. Much much easier than texting. I suppose we could use FB messenger but the chat window works better for us.
RIP AIM indeed!
I had a lot of fun with AIM back in the day. Used it to “spoil” plans for a surprise party for me. I’d suspected a friend was planning something, and we always tried to one-up each other.
I took the screen name of one of her friends and co-conspirators, but where one of the letters in the name was a lower case “L,” I made a handle that was almost identical, but replaced the “L” with an upper case “i.”
I IMed her and within 5 minutes, I got her to reveal all the details.
I can safely say the rise of AIM is how I learned to type. I’ll never forget some of my old screennames: TommyX2000 (my very first!), Predator3K, Hllshwkeye to name a few.
(Shout out to anyone on the boards I went to grade and/or high school with that recognized those!)
I probably had more screen names than I can remember, especially when you account for the fake ones I made when I was pretending to be some high school lesbian like everyother guy on the internet.
Another aspect of AIM dying, and this is true of most messaging services, is that it’s also the death of the chatroom. I miss going on AIM and finding a chatroom of a topic I was a fan of and just talking with random people on the internet about it. I struggled with loneliness so much in college and in grad school that I wished those chatrooms still existed.
RIP AIM. In a lot of ways, you were too pure for this world.
Never used Aim all that much, but I really do miss ICQ and MSN Chat, especially their local chat rooms.
I had to use it for a corporate job where everyone had it, ten years ago. It was an open-concept office, so that was the only way to talk about people behind their backs 
I can’t even remember what my username was.
I was working in the Network Operations Center at AOL when AOL bought ICQ. The ICQ guys made a ton of money for like 5 servers run out of a hotel room in Tel Aviv*, 280 million IIRC.
The first month or so was a nightmare of ‘ICQs is up. YAY!’, ‘ICQ is down! Boo!’.
AIM was pretty slick tech back in the day. IIRC, the buddy list lived on the TFEPs (Terminal Front End Processors) of the AOL system and the messages went from TFEP to TFEP which made it really quick. And AIM was solid, I can’t remember any giant issues with it while I was at AOL.
Haven’t signed into it in years though.
Slee
*This is going back a ways so I could be off. I do remember, at the time, wondering that AOL plopped down tons of money for the service and basically tossed all the hardware away after the service was running on the AOL backend.