The life and times of the IM

When you think of the instant message, generally your thoughts only go back a few years. If you’re positively archaic, like me, that may even mean ICQ. For most, it means AOL and MSN Messenger. In reality, the IM was born as long ago as 1960 with the creation of PLATO, which was funded by a shared Army-Navy-Air Force pool and housed at the University of Illinois. By 1967, it would also be funded by the NSF.

PLATO began as an education tool, designed in a drill-based fashion that would allow students to bypass lessons they already understood. Though the first application only supported one user, and PLATO II only allowed two, by PLATO III (1966), it could support twenty. PLATO IV, in 1972, was the first to support “Term Talk”, which allowed user to share information via electronic chat. By 1975, PLATO IV served almost 150 different locations.

A man named William Norris, CEO of CDC, became very interested in PLATO as it evolved. He thought that it would be a learning platform that could level out educational inequalities by offering higher education to people who would not otherwise be able to afford university. In 1976, CDC purchased the commercial rights to PLATO, and through aggressive advertising hoped to sell it as a universal teaching tool, more effective than a human teacher and never susceptible to sick days or strikes. Reviews in the ’80s tended to agree that while PLATO was perhaps as effective as a human teacher, it was not more effective, and at $50 per student per hour, it tended to less cost effective than a traditional classroom.

In 1986, Norris stepped down as CEO, and the PLATO service was slowly killed off. Though designed for computer education, PLATO’s real legacy is in its online communication features. PLATO Notes was introduced in 1973 and was among the world’s first online message boards and was the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools for online communication, including Personal Notes (email), Talkomatic (chat rooms), and Term-Talk (instant messaging and remote screen sharing).

PLATO’s architecture also made it an ideal platform for online gaming. Many extremely popular games were developed on PLATO during the 1970s and 1980s, such as Empire (a massively multiplayer game based on Star Trek), Airfight (a precursor to Microsoft Flight Simulator), the original Freecell, and several “dungeons and dragons” games that presaged MUDs and MOOs as well as popular shoot-em-up games like Doom and Quake.

Though PLATO had a loyal fan-base, the first general instant messenger introduced to the internet was ICQ, in 1996. ICQ, a play on “I Seek You” was created by Mirabilis, an Israeli start-up company based in Tel Aviv. ICQ was known for its simple UI, ease of use, file transfer capabilities, and for the “ICQ Number”. The ICQ Number is, in my opinion, the easiest way to add someone to your IM list. People would list their number on the internet, and with a simple cut&paste, you had added them to your ICQ friends list. Easy as pie. In 1998, Mirabilis and ICQ were purchased by AOL, and not too surprisingly the program quickly went to shit.

Despite buying ICQ, AOL has its own IM program, called AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), which came out in 1997. Though this program was usable for a brief period of time, it too fell prey to the AOL curse, which is highly regarded by people who only know enough about their computers to be able to turn them on (maybe) and surf the web, but only if a searchbar is automatically included in their home page. Everyone else, with reason, hates AOL with a fiery passion. Not that I’m biased or anything. AOL may just be on to something, though, as they prepare to replace AIM with Triton. Triton highlights tabbed chatting, and is being completely rebuilt from the ground up to support VoIP technology. It is currently in beta.

Microsoft, the big boo daddy of the computing world, hopped on board the IM wagon with MSN Messenger in 1999. When it first came out, MSN Messenger could be used on both its own network as well as the AIM network, making it a handy little chat-tool indeed. AOL, after trying for a long period of time, finally blocked MSN Messenger from using their network, isolating it to its own .NET messenger service. In their attempt to take over the world, Microsoft created a browser-based version of the Messenger client, which could be used on any computer with internet access, without having to download the program. Of course, this became a big security hole, and a big pain in the ass, and sucked in general. They also created MSN Mobile, which allowed users to send IMs via their cell phones. Welcome to the Microsoft Galaxy.

Yahoo! also has its own IM service, which supports VoIP already, and alerts you when you have new Yahoo! email. But I don’t really care, and I’m not going to tell you about it.

User Info:

AIM – Active: unknown; total registered: 195 mil (Jan ’03)
ICQ – Active: 6 mil; total registered: 140 mil (June ’03)
MSN – Active: 100 mil; total registered: 155 mil (April ’05)

You can see a big table comparing these services here.

I apologize if this post was horribly boring. If you’d like to complain, IM me. I use MSN Messenger through my Hotmail account, dragon_bebop (at) hotmail (dot) com. And really, you should IM me anyway, because it would be fun to chat with some of you. Just don’t expect me to join AIM. I won’t give in to the dark side!