ICQ program: what it is and what it is for

In the distant already in 1998, no one could think that the brainchild of one little-known Israeli company Mirabilis will make a real revolution in the world of electronic communication. If you have not guessed yet, then we are talking about the ICQ program. What is it, then no one heard, and little was known about its possibilities. And today it is difficult to find a computer or a smartphone, for which its owner has not installed this wonderful software.

Almost immediately after the announcement of the new server program, Mirabilis companies "dropped" several times a day, as the number of people who wanted to install it on their computer immediately was simply huge. Already in 2005, users of the official version of ICQ alone numbered about 250 million people around the world, and this is without taking into account the numerous software clones! And all this excitement passed around a small and modest ICQ utility. What is it and why did the whole world seem to go crazy?

It is necessary to start with the fact that the very idea of a new "messenger" was simple to genius. The creators wrote an elementary application, with the installation of which each user was assigned a unique UIN (serial number) and login (if desired).

After going through the procedure of simple registration, you could search for your friends, relatives and colleagues, even if they lived on the other side of the Earth. Note that there were no social networks at that time, and so all had to cope with ICQ. What is this for users of those times not spoiled by the abundance of high-speed Internet?

It is no exaggeration to say that the program instantly became a hit of the season precisely because it allowed to find the right person and instantly contact him. Of course, in those days e-mail was widespread, but there were no searches for people's addresses, and often registered users simply forgot about their boxes, checking them once a week, and even less often. If you used ICQ (what it is, we already said), then your message came to the person at the very moment when he went online. Fantastic!

In subsequent years, developers worked tirelessly to improve their creation. Here we should make a digression, saying that already in the same 1998, America-Online Corporation unerringly sensed the potential of Mirabilis, unknown at that time, having bought it "with giblets." The capabilities of a large company allowed to constantly develop the software, so that soon there was already such a program as ICQ on the phone.

Unfortunately, such a rapid development had its own "dark sides". Trying to "extort" at least some money from ICQ users, AOL began to embed into its code some hundreds of ad units. There were opportunities for video conferencing, chat rooms, and games that at the time could not function properly due to the lack of a normal connection to the Internet. Mass outflow of users to competing programs began (and there were already more than a dozen of them).

Seeing this, the creators of "ICQ" urgently made her "liposuction", removing a lot of unnecessary trash and greatly reducing the size of the installation package. Of course, about a couple hundred kilobytes of the first version can only be remembered with nostalgia, but even ICQ for Android today is quite acceptable in size of 7 MB.