I’m always surprised when I look at my friends list, and realize just how not weird it was in college for totally random people to get your screen name from someone and send you a message.
Lots of fond memories of amusing away messages. And as well, lagging people with HTML parsing bugs. 
I’ve seen it and I stand far, far away from it.
Presumably, Shingy is still employed.
Anyone else remember Yak? It was (I guess) like a dedicated IM (or chatroom) device. Must’ve used dial-up. A friend had one, in 1990 or '91.
Ugh, that guy. Given that AOL is a company who in the past derived a huge % of its revenue from tricking older folks into paying for redundant services, I would wager he has created the appearance of real work, while doing very little of it.
I’ve worked for two different corporations that used AIM for inter-office chat. Can’t beat free.
ICQ! I used to use it to talk to friends even when sitting in the same room.
Yes, until recently the governmental agency I work for used AIM for interoffice chat. Now it’s Skype, with offsite capabilities through an Outlook portal. Thank god we don’t handle much really sensitive information.
Lucky! I get to deal with our users going "why does Lync 2010 do x’, and the fix is usually a combination of ‘install this update on the server and run this obscrure powershell-esque command, and pray that it works.’
What other application requires you to run the fracking setup program to update a certificate?!?!!? NONE OTHER.
I’ve long since moved on, but AIM was my first exposure to using the internet to communicate with other people. I’ll always remember it fondly for that.
Technology has much improved, but I do miss having away messages. Everything these days is built to capture as much of our attention as possible. I miss when software technology respected our desires to focus on other things when we wanted.
Then there’s the pure nostalgia. Sure it’s silly and sometimes awful in retrospect, but I truly enjoyed the days of customizing every bit of software I could. Even if that did involve questionable fonts, colors, and sound bites. These days I don’t really enjoy computing anymore.
Last I checked, a startlingly large number of mostly rural and elderly Americans still use POTS dial-up access, and 2.1-million of them pay AOL $20/month for that service. That’s half a billion dollars in annual revenue, more than enough to take on a charity case like Shingy as their in-house clown
Oh that AIM. I’m fine with that. I read the headline and thought, wow, how crass, considering how many members of the American Indian Movement have already been shot.
My old AOL screen-name is still my primary e-mail I got it so long ago, it 's only 7 characters long and contains no numbers. I’ve had it since I had to go on a business trip to Germany and needed dial-up access for my speedy Toshiba Satellite 205CDS with a blistering P75 and 8 MB of RAM. Being able to keep in touch with family and work at 14,400 baud without having to pay horrendous long-distance bills. Can you imagine! It’s like living in the future!
I was even able to connect through the single Weimar era cloth coated twisted copper line installed in a 650 year old Bavarian Gasthaus I was staying in. The elderly Greek lady running the place was a bit unhappy when she picked up the phone and got modem squeal in her ear though.
I’ve thought about switching to a different e-mail, but I’ve got 21 years of internet signups, forum memberships and password resets mapped to it. Everyone I know and am related to knows the address. Including my 95 year old grandmother. It’s dug in like a tick. I just hope they don’t discontinue the free webmail.
And, no, I’m not 75 years old and I stopped paying AOL the instant the screennames became free.
Little Bobby Tables? Is that really you? Man, your parents really fucked me over back in grade school.
Anywho, hope you’re doing well.
Anywho, hope you’re doing well.
I believe he was mysteriously kicked out of every school he tried to attend, even the ones with “professional” DBAs.
The thing i really miss was the little handwriting/mspaint thing, being able to scrawl random crap to close friends was hilarious. was a very bad day when they cut that feature 
I also had a huge bank of custom gifs for annoying friends with, another feature cut and sadly missed
There did seem to be a rather annoying period where every single MSN update removed yet another feature for no reason 
