So long, ICQ
So, ICQ is shutting down. I decided to log in one last time, since I still, miraculously, have my original credentials. UIN 5437541, password unchanged since 1998—still rolls right off the fingers.
This isn’t what ICQ actually looked like for me when I was using it, but this is the closest I can get to a little snapshot in time before it’s gone forever. I was, apparently, a 21 year old geek from Halifax. “Seen a long time ago”.
The identities behind some of the screen names here have been lost to the sands of time. Although some of them were friends from real life, many more were ephemeral friends from the ether. I don’t have any idea who vertmamba was; I remember heyheystranger being a pretty close internet friend, but I don’t remember anything about her now. I talked to one of the people on this list earlier today.
ICQ really was something special to me. I was absolutely glued to it for most of 1998 in particular, although I used it for years and years. I made some great friends on there:
- PaQwrat was a 40-something mom who had the biggest MP3 collection I was aware of. If you wanted anything at all, odds were she had it—and if she didn’t, that was a challenge to be met.
- pookie was a random college student in, I think, Wisconsin. Sometimes his girlfriend would be on his account, and she was also fun to talk to. I often find myself thinking about one of his random away messages: “why use sham poo when you can use real poo?”. Memory is the oddest thing.
- arleyrose was a girl my age who lived somewhere in New York; she taught me about Björk and The Sugarcubes and Tori Amos. We were both super excited when Garbage released Version 2.0. She wanted to go to art school when she graduated high school.
- astracity2000 was an Australian named Simon who used to make a bunch of different virtual pet games for Windows 98. He eventually ended up moving to Canada for a year and lived in my mom’s basement for a few months.
- bleach (Dan) was a college kid named Dan, somewhere in Ontario, with much better web design skills and the ability to actually use Photoshop. I had a picture he made as my desktop wallpaper for months and months. (He used to make techno songs, too. I have a few of them kicking around somewhere still.)
ICQ was the first social media platform I ever made a home on, and the uh-oh! notification sound will be etched in my mind forever. It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a quarter of a century since I was using it all day long; it’s even harder to believe that I’m still talking to some of those internet friends on a regular basis.
Goodbye, ICQ. Thanks for the friendships.