90s Chat Apps We Used To Love

Remember how we used to chat back in the 90s?

It’s Throwback Thursday! And what better way to kick off our #tbt articles than looking back at the way we used to chat online back in the day?

Ah the 90s, the time where we watched friends, downloaded totally legal music from Napster and cursed our mother for picking up the phone (and dropping our dial-up connection) when our download was at 99%.

Way back then in an era before Slack, Whatsapp and iMessage we had the real deal:

ICQ (Or 1997’s OkCupid)

Just look at that interface! Aside from chatting with your school friends, ICQ let you search for online people by location, age group and gender. It was the perfect tool for a teenager to find virtual & real world love. Remember the UH-OH! sound?

Netmeeting (Early Chatroulette)

Webcams were expensive and clunky back in the day and netmeeting was one of the few video chatting apps out there. It was fun to randomly chat with strangers around the world, until well everyone just decided to get naked.

MSN Messenger

Microsoft was on a roll with their instant messaging apps. MSN quickly took a huge chunk out of ICQ’s user based and by the early 2000’s it had more users worldwide.

AOL Instant Messager (AIM)

Did you know AOL still makes millions of dollars from Dial-up internet users? Talk about long tail users. Way back they also used to have a super popular Instant Messaging client (I wonder if anyone uses it anymore?).

Originally published at ideaware.co on April 28, 2016.