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Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.

AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.

Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.

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Funny, that's always the impression I had of ICQ back in the day...

Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?

Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?

do you mean Trillian, the software that offered a (very themable) frontend to AIM, ICQ, yahoo and (i think) at least 3 more chat services? the awesomeness of Trillian made it obvious how useless it is for so many different services to coexist while they all offer the same value. still true today

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