Uh-oh - Messenger pioneer ICQ will be shut down at the end of June
ICQ, the indispensable messenger at the turn of the millennium, will soon no longer work. A look back at the culture of messaging.
ICQ 1998: The contact list on the left, next to it the usual submenus stacked on top of each other. Here they are used for the settings for each contact.
(Image: c't)
"Do you still know your ICQ number?" - This question is a kind of litmus test for decades of Internet users. At the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, the ICQ number on the business card for full-time online users was part of good manners. Less good, because it was annoying, was the standard notification with the cartoon-like "Uh-Oh" that every early ICQ user still has in their ears.
On June 26, 2024, the service will be shut down for good, as the current operator announced on the still existing icq.com website. In 2010, the Russian investment company DST, which also operates mail.ru and the Facebook clone VKontakte, bought ICQ from AOL. This company is now known simply as "VK". In 2020, ‘ICQ New’ should breathe new life into Messenger
The former online giant AOL had acquired the messenger in 1998 from the Israeli company Mirabilis, which had launched ICQ just two years earlier. As AOL stated in 2001, ICQ already had over 100 million users at the time. In 2009, it was said to have over 470 million, which was probably the peak of instant messaging on the PC, as smartphones were slowly gaining acceptance at the time.
The UIN instead of a phone number was the trick
ICQ was so revolutionary and popular at the end of the 1990s because it was so simple and worked so well. The name stands for "I seek you": I'm looking for you. And the ICQ number, which was used like a telephone number, made it easy to find users. Today's smartphone messengers are usually also linked to the phone number of the device. Because there was no unique identification for PCs, ICQ simply introduced its own number, the "User Identification Number" (UIN).
That was it: you could use your ICQ number to log on to a third-party device, use the messenger that was usually installed in Internet cafés, for example, and simply chat away. It was all server-based, so you didn't need your own infrastructure. Files could also be transferred, and later voice and video calls were also possible. It was also possible to create groups, a function that later became indispensable for many people thanks to WhatsApp. The ICQ directory could also be searched for usernames and, if stored, email addresses, but this was not absolutely necessary. Simply entering the UIN was also sufficient for anonymity. On your own PC, you could then assign usernames to the numbers, but these were not published.
ICQ instead of a call
Because this time-delayed communication, which was also organized in groups, worked so well in contrast to text messages - which were often still chargeable - ICQ was often an autostart program on Windows PCs at the time. People networked in this way, especially the still young scene of online gamers. Around the turn of the millennium, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was the actual nervous system for them, but ICQ was the tool of choice for direct 1:1 communication. Only when someone could not be reached via ICQ - i.e. was obviously not sitting at their PC - did they reach for the telephone.
In contrast to today's messengers, ICQ had also been designed for a certain openness since it was taken over by AOL, thanks to the "Open System for CommunicAtion in Realtime" (OSCAR) protocol. AOL had documented this reasonably well, but only really disclosed it much later. However, the APIs were so transparent that it was possible to develop your own clients for ICQ and other messengers; popular tools included Miranda, Pidgin and Trillian.
Security as a problem
Because instant messaging was new to many people at the end of the 1990s, the problems that still exist today were also present in the early days of ICQ: Account theft, phishing and spam are just some of the unsightly side effects. People preferred to block requests from unknown accounts after their first bad experiences, and at a LAN party, it was better to secure the computer to prevent changes to the locally stored contact list. And the security of the application itself was not always ideal: as recently as 2011, it was still possible to infect ICQ with malware via its automatic update function.
As with many mobile messengers today, ICQ was financed early on by advertising. The desktop client offered its own channels, such as for travel and shopping. At times, ICQ was AOL's most commercially successful product. The company does not state why VK is now discontinuing it, but recommends switching to VK Messenger.
Where does the ICQ sound come from?
All that remains to be clarified is where the Uh-Oh sound really comes from. This is not as easy as you might think because sound memory can be deceptive. Many people associate the sample with the Amiga version of the game "Lemmings" (1991), but that's not quite true. Before you blast the cute characters - which is sometimes necessary - they say "Oh no". This can be heard, for example, at this point in a YouTube video with a longplay of the game. The game's expansion released in the same year was also called "Oh no! More Lemmings", and not "Uh-Oh".
Probably inspired by this, a similar sound can be found in the equally bustling game "Worms" (1995), where the characters say "Uh-Oh". This sounds similar to the ICQ sound from 1996, but doesn't quite fit either. One possible explanation is that the developers may have independently found the same sound on one of the popular sample CDs of the time, which were primarily intended for music production. The same sample could then have been slightly altered for Worms and ICQ.
(nie)
