I am one of the few people, it seems, that can not for the life of me remember my ICQ number... but I was there, using it.
Anyone remember Trillian? Having your Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Messenger, etc all in one program..
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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I absolutely remember Trillian. It's what convinced me to finally make an AIM account to talk with my "mainstream" friends who didn't have ICQ or IRC, since I wouldn't actually need to run any new software.
I also don't remember my ICQ number, but I had one. And I remember my first time stepping into a 99 cent only store and their registers used that "uh oh" sound from it. I always felt like nobody else recognized where it was from.
18982172 here.
Fun fact. ICQ was the the go to messaging platform for the porn industry and was actively being used in the industry right up to the point it was bought by a russian company.
Shit, my steam account is older than most of the highschoolers I work with
icq 29533018 hit me up, but of course that was already an additional fancy layer on top of text only chat. I had it bridged in my bitlbee setup via libpidgin together with my gtalk and irc and other xmpp stuff, and had it run in irssi in a screen on my server (next to the other screen that ran mutt for my email).
and check this: to this day I consider it the best chat setup I've ever had.
I cut my teeth on bulletin boards. We actually ran a 2-node bbs with 2 dedicated phone lines out of our house.
Anybody here remember Plastic, circa 2000? It was a forum kind of like Reddit, although I don't remember if it had upvotes or not.
upvotes and gamification of human interaction ruined the internet and are directly responsible for the extremity of discourse today.
The internet was so much better before that shit.
Which is also the era before social media, because as far as I'm aware, social media introduced those addiction driven gamification mechanism for what should be, by now, clearly obvious reasons to even the most thick skulled individuals.
Man, I still remember my old dial-up BBS handle.
ICQ? Listen here, young man.
I grew up in outback Australia, in the before times. My first time online was a 1200-baud modem on a BBC Electron.
We did school over HF radio with School of the Air, had no phone lines, and barely reliable electricity.
Do not speak to me of the deep magics. I was there when they were written.
double biceps flex
farts
breaks a hip
Ooh, Australia, I have a question. Was PalTalk a big thing over there? Obviously way after what you described. I remember my father having an old classmate over from Australia and he introduced us to "The Internet", and how instant messaging was possible a cross borders through PalTalk. Even though I never heard anyone using it in Europe, even years past that encounter.
No, not that I know of. We use to have local / oz only IRC channels, because overseas calls were expensive. So, you would dial into your ISP and then have access to city/state wide IRCs like AusNet. Later that became national. That was circa 94-99.
It was BBS before that.
I remember buying a small black and white TV from a second hand store to watch the 2000 Olympics and chatting to people over mIRC simultaneously.
The TV was sitting right next to a Apple Newton in the store. When I went back to get it, it had already been sold. Ended up buying a palm pilot 1000 instead.
I had an icq number in the 184000 range. :) Bragging rights!
Every time this topic comes up, I feel very nostalgic. Of course the tech was not as good, but the internet was free of big tech.
I was using netscape as my first web browser.
I have a 5 digit steam ID, made on the 3rd day steam existed. Back when we all hated the concept of it.
Frigg off, phreak!
"I have usernames older than you" is actually a pretty sick burn
Saw it on an episode of MASH.
Henry is dating a 22 year old nurse. Hawkeye tells Henry that Henry has bunions older than his girlfriend.
I have usernames older than you
Can't wait till I can use that did someday.
I remember trying to play online quake in the 90's, I live in new Zealand... We had dial up, my latency was around the 5s mark. I have up pretty quick.
If I wanted to play multiplayer games, it was taking my desktop computer to a friends house, connecting them together with 10Mb BNC networking, and don't forget the 50ohm terminators.
A friend spent a week trying to download the original pirated version on XP, the couple of hundred meg file would get stopped for various reasons.
I have my full name as a gmail account, I got it as soon as it possible. firstname.lastname@gmail.com
My YouTube account is older than Pewdiepie's account... and that's my second YouTube account.
I will invoke the old words
A/S/L
I actually was 15/f/ca. I love that it has become an internet inside joke. I spent way too much time in the Yahoo star wars chat rooms back then 😅
head nod
16/F/Cali
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot slaps CaptPretentious around a bit with a large trout
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If you bought your dial-up internet from your local newspaper, there’s a pretty good chance I was doing tech support for it.
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