AIM (software)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1997 · AOL (America Online), released as a free download for Windows computers · Also known as AOL Instant Messenger; AIM; aim; AIM Phoenix (the fan-run revival server)

What it is

AIM was a free computer program made by the American company AOL that let people send typed messages to each other instantly over the internet. You picked a screen name, kept a list of friends called a buddy list, and could see who was online at that moment. When you stepped away, you could leave a short note called an away message that anyone on your list could read. It ran from 1997 to 2017.

Where it came from

AOL already had a messaging feature inside its paid service. In May 1997 it released AIM as a separate free download, so people didn't need an AOL subscription to use it. It spread through American schools and universities in the late 1990s, with its yellow running stick figure as the logo. By 2006 it reportedly had about half of the instant messaging market in North America. Text messaging on phones, Google Talk, Facebook and later iMessage and WhatsApp took its users, and Verizon, which had bought AOL, shut it down on 15 December 2017.

How people used it

Teenagers came home from school, switched on the computer and chatted with the same friends they'd just left, often in several windows at once. The away message was the main stage. People changed it through the day to say where they were, which party they'd gone to, or what mood they were in, and they often used a song lyric aimed at one particular person. Friends were expected to read it, guess who it was about and message to ask. Profiles held more lyrics, in-jokes and lists of best friends. People also spent ages on fonts, colours and the screen name itself.

Why it mattered

For a generation of American teenagers, AIM was where friendships, crushes and fallings-out carried on after school, without parents listening on the phone line. The away message let people announce their mood to everyone they knew without saying it to anyone directly, which is the habit later built into Facebook statuses and Twitter. Its sign-on sounds and the running man logo are still instantly recognised by people who used it, and when it closed in 2017 plenty of them posted tributes and old screen names.

The jokes around it

• The creaking door sound when a buddy signed on, and the slam when they signed off.
• Away messages that were only a song lyric, posted so one person on the list would notice.
• Embarrassing screen names chosen at twelve, full of x's and numbers, that people later had to explain.
• SmarterChild, a chat robot on AIM that bored teenagers tried to insult or trip up.
• "brb" and "g2g", typed just before closing the window.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People wanted a way to tell all their friends how they felt without having to tell any one of them. AIM's away message gave them that, and the vague lyric aimed at someone who'd know became a habit that every later app copied.

What noah is not sure of

The 52% North American market share for 2006 comes from the Wikipedia text and isn't independently checked. SmarterChild's launch year (around 2001) isn't certain. The exact description of the sign-on and sign-off sounds is from memory and may vary between versions.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.