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Comment by yokoprime | Hacker News Reader

> or that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was.

Living in Europe, I never saw the AIM client in use anywhere. I've never heard of anyone locally who used it. It was all ICQ, or later MSN / Skype.

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Of course. "America" is in the name.

Technically it isn't, since AIM is "AOL Instant Messenger", where AOL happens to also be an acronym, but it isn't America On-Line Instant Messenger, since then it'd be AOLIM.

I wonder if there's a word for these kinds of nested or multi-layer acronyms. Acronyms in acronyms.

It's like a recursive acronym with a base case, so it terminates.

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

Somebody needs to make a recursive acronym in the shape of the Ackermann function.

It's not recursive, though -- that would only be true if AOL stood for AIM On-Line.

Maybe "nested acronym" is a better term?

> Multi-layered acronyms: AIM: "AOL Instant Messenger," in which "AOL" originally stood for "America Online"

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

AOL as an ISP existed in the UK at least, a couple of my friends used it and I had a bunch of the AOL discs for some reason (they came with PC Zone or PC Gamer magazines, maybe)

I was a european who had AIM installed because I had a lot of interactions with Americans I had met on IRC.

But here everyone was on ICQ, and then MSN Messenger. That's when I bailed.

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