More important than ICQ is IrCQNet, the IRC network administered by Mirablis. It opened on July 5, 1998. I've been a regular there since Feb or March of 2000.
It was a wide-open net at that time, and remained so until Mirablis switched to unReal IRCd in August of 2002. Since then, it has become more and more restricted with a good half of the standard IRC commands disabled.
AAAhhh ICQ..
I remember back in the days of dialup I had a 28.8 dialup modem using Netscape and ICQ. I started using Microsofts messanger because it seemed like all of my friends had it and those who didn't could easily start using it since it was built into the OS.
Sorry for the double post but just 1 more thing to add...
Today I don't use an instant messanger at all. Today's verson of instant messanging is texting on your phone. I bet if you checked overall usage of these instant messangers you would see a sharp decline while phone texting went up on a sharp incline.
I can't remember my old icq # and password so I created a new one a few years ago. It is a pretty nice client, better than the plain AIM one but just knowing that AOL had a hand in it in 1998 lost my interest and I quit using it. I still have buddies on my AIM that refuse to use MSN but I rarely ever talk to them. The show up in google talk...I wonder if there is a way to abandon the AIM portion of google talk. I don't like seeing those crappy AOL icons in my google.
AOL LMAO! Please dont report on this crap. Although I will say it did make me laugh. No one cares about AOL and the only people who do dont even know yet that they really dont. Let AOL die in peace.
Haven't checked the "monthly fee" on AOL recently, but last time it was around $20+ for dial up. Those who pay $20 a month for dial up is either too old or too stupid.
I'm also a Trillian user but started it all with ICQ and what is essentially a 5 digit number (11xxxx) considering they started at 100000. I still use the account but not much.
I only used ICQ back when I played UO of course this was back when the game was released and things like ventrillo and teamspeak weren't around back then.
ICQ was the first IM network I ever used. My account number is 8 digits. However, I haven't used any of the IM networks in years. It was simply taking up too much of my time with people always wanting to chat when I was trying to do other things. Marking myself as away all the time defeated the purpose.
the numbers used to register in sequence but then they changed it to random megabillion numbers. i'm in the 3rd million reg'ed. had a 6 digit but lost it