Distributed Mind

I made the mistake of logging on to my ICQ account today, which meant that about 5 random people I had never heard of before were dying to talk to me. For all you young pip-squeaks, ICQ was the original instant messaging client, way before there was AIM. So, talking to some random Israeli teenager prompted my memory of the heady days back when instant messaging was young.

As I recall it, ICQ was originally positioned as Internet paging not "instant messaging." I suspect the idea was that you would use it to check if people were online and then tell them to go to some IRC channel or open up Pow-Wow (anybody remember that?) or check their e-mail or whatever. Anyways, that was how I figured I would use back when I first got an account in late 1996 - wow, nine years already - though in fact I always ended up just having a conversation in the ICQ client just like I use it now. Given the paging metaphor, ICQ would open a new window for every message sent originally, which was inconvenient, but my friends and I were too lazy to set up IRC or something like that, so we just talked in ICQ anyway. I actually didn't start using ICQ until fall of 1997, since no one I knew was using it before that, even though I had had an account for a year. But when I got to college, the technically savvy students were starting to use it by then. My account number is lower than 200,000; most of my friends had seven digit account numbers, so you can see how ICQ grew quickly.

ICQ always attracted random people looking to chat. A lot of internationals seem to hang on it still, as my experience today demonstrated. But I had forgotten what it was like to just start talking to some random person from across the world. Not very fun usually, in fact, though I have met some interesting people in the past. Pow-Wow - which was an actual chat client - was a lot like that too. I never did the IRC thing, but still, pretty similar. I just remember how exciting it was talking to people from all over the world. It wasn't really all that fun, but it was so novel. It's amazing how much we - or at least I - have come to take for granted in such a short period of time. Though "short period of time" - nine years of instant messaging, and I am only 26. That's the entire life span of my youngest sister, too! (Of course, IRC has been around almost as long as I have been, but I am thinking in terms of my own experiences.)

Sorry, just some random reminiscing.