It was a large project: on the desktop program (“client”), we had to create a sleek user interface to let people see their buddies when they came online, allow them to change the color of the font in a cool way, and so on. Yahoo and ICQ each had millions of users. AIM had tens of millions of users AOL had become the country’s biggest dial-up provider in the mid-’90s by blitzing everyone’s mailboxes with CD-ROMs, and all AOL users instantly became AIM users. I’ll call it Messenger for short.Īt the time the big players in instant messaging were AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo, and ICQ. Buddy List? C U C Me? MSN Messenger? No, MSN Messenger Service. The terrible name came from Marketing, which had become something of a joke for always picking the clunkiest and least imaginative product names. I was put on the group that was building MSN Messenger Service, Microsoft’s instant messaging app. In the summer of 1998 I graduated from college and went to work as a programmer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

Icq chat became private