[richarme]

Good memories from a more innocent time. The ICQ client truncated long filenames in the UI, so you could send "image.jpg (50 spaces) .exe" which would open an embedded picture and install a back-door while just seeming like regular picture.

I do miss casually texting with people on the computer rather than the phone, and I don't think it's only due to nostalgia or having more leisure time back then:

- If someone was online, it would typically be a good time for a casual, interactive chat. Texting someone on the phone is (at least for me) rarely "live", because it usually happens at an inconvenient time for one of the parties.

- Much faster to type, and easier to copy-paste stuff from other places. Can communicate almost as effortlessly as a spoken conversation.

- Easier to multi-task in case of a slow reply.

I don't enjoy texting on the phone. Millennial logging out for the last time. AFK BRB.

[sedatk]

ICQ even had a realtime chat feature that showed keystrokes as they were typed.

[ihaveajob]

That was my favorite feature. And the random match part, way earlier than ChatRoulette. I remember talking to some kid in the Philippines about the history of her country and mine (Spain). Mind-blowing at the time.

[sorenjan]

I only use the phone to send messages when I'm not at home, otherwise I use the computer. One of the best things about Telegram is their good desktop client, they even have online indicators like ICQ.

This was true for ICQ as well, in a way. I used some java app on my Sony Ericsson phone back in the day to read and send ICQ messages, but of course back then you had to connect to the internet explicitly, phones weren't always online so it was of limited use but still cool.

[dev1ycan]

you can even change the message sound, I changed it to msn

[geek_at]

don't forget they had terrible security even for the time. In their client you could do text customizations like bold, italic, etc. and they did it by just sending HTML over the wire.

This meant that if you used a custom client (which they didn't allow), you could just send HTML which got evaluated so you could force users to download stuff or send HTML forms or iframes

When this became semi public (in hacker circles) they went after the people talking about it with legal action instead of fixing their stuff

[richarme]

Eww, I wasn't even aware of that. I thought the filename UI issue was actually kind of a subtle fail and I was proud to find it, but that one is terrible.

Here's another blast from the past.. List of ICQ exploits on neworder.box.sk, the website I learned my first 1337 h4xx0r skills from: https://web.archive.org/web/20040829081726/http://neworder.b...