At the beginning, already have AOL Instant Messenger. That’s not really the beginning. Talkomatic, Compuserve’s CB Emulator, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) all preceded it. But AIM is the beginning of anything elsean all-time, real-time internet gateway for the Norwegian military.
You don’t have to be a computer junkie to ride the AIM train. Your parents received a compact disc in the mail, you plug your transparent plastic corded phone into a modem connected to Gateway 2000, and you’re off. Rather, you have above. Very online, and unaware at the time that the portal will disappear behind you when you pass, that you will never live a completely offline life again.
AIM, which debuted 25 years ago this month, represents that moment for me. It plunges me into a universe of countless pixels, tons of distractions, and a tendency to use bland screen names (my only embellishment is my basketball jersey number, embedded in my initials). ). It is also a live social network. A digital door opened, and millions of us scrambled to our seats to see who just logged in, who came down to chat.
Sometimes you had to walk. So you sent an away message: I’m not here. I’m in class / at the game / my dad needs to use the computer. I left you with an emotional quote that shows how deeply I am. Or, here’s the lyrics that signal me too you. Never mind that My Away Message is aimed at you.
I remember the message away. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the novelty of the Internet in the 1990s, and I also miss… leaving. But this is about Away Messages itself — the bits of code that built Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message is a full-featured text box, a small MySpace profile, or a Facebook status update years before they exist. It’s a boundary too: An Away Message doesn’t just appear as a response after someone texts you, it’s completely visible to that person before they i want you.
Nothing like this exists in our modern messaging apps. Oh okay, you will insist that I mention some message railing technology companies have implemented in recent years. On iPhone and iPad, there are “Do Not Disturb” and “Focus” modes, while the Android operating system supports “Do Not Disturb” as well as “Scheduled Send”, as a Google spokesperson put it, “ It’s great when you’re texting across time zones, like when you want to send an Early Morning Happy Birthday Wish to your friend in London. ” And yes, you can “Turn off notifications” on WhatsApp.
Workplace chat app always working Slack offers “Update your status”, the closest we have to Away Messages today. You can give a fair warning that you’re not at the Office or put a “sick” emoji on your profile. You can write “Writing, please DND,” because again you are late for the deadline. Turns out this was a harassed invitation.
More than just cute images, these digital symbols are also a universal language for the digital age.
This is not a railing. These are the little orange cones we all have to go through, like the 15-year-olds in the driver’s post. Even the names of these features — Focus, Scheduled Delivery — are phrases born of a workaholic culture. Yields ennui, poetry, pink font, tilde and asterisk.
Of course, what I’m reminiscing is a completely different technological protocol. There is instant messaging and there is also text messaging. The two are practically indistinguishable today, but 25 years ago the experiences were very different. AIM is a desktop client that sends bits of information to an internet server when you log in, exposes you to the people on your Close Friends List, and shows you the same information when your friends your login. It used a proprietary protocol called OSCAR, which stands for Open System for Communication in Realtime. Real-time means live chat. Text messaging on the other hand is known as SMS, or Short Message Service. And this mostly happens on mobile devices that are connected to the cellular network.
