7 Facts About AIM to Make You LOL

Author: Matt Gilligan / Source: did you know?

I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now that AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is going away forever in December 2017. Okay, maybe you didn’t even know the chat service was still around, but it is, and it’s about to be retired permanently.

Let’s take a look at 7 facts about the AIM, which ruled the online chat game before we all had mini computers in our hands.

You used to have to pay for AOL, but in 1996, some employees there started kicking around the idea for a FREE, standalone messaging service. This small group worked on the project unofficially, on servers that someone had supposedly “lost,” without pitching it AOL’s executives. AIM was an instant success when made available to the public and had 40 million users by 1999.

The engineers who created AIM often updated the service without approval from the higher-ups. One of the decisions they made with official approval was the buddy icon.