Classic aim away messages8/15/2023 With that evolution, our social contracts have changed.Ĭatapulting even further back into the past for a moment: Old-fashioned phone calls used to, and sometimes still do, start with “Hey, you free?” Santamaria points out. We’re all glued to Messages, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal on our phones, and in many instances we receive the same messages at the same time on our laptops. Now, “asynchronous” messaging has become the dominant form of text-based remote communications, Santamaria says. ![]() “If I want to tell you something I send it, you receive it, and then you respond on your time.” ![]() Back when he was working on iChat, a Mac client that supported live AIM chats and was the precursor to iMessage, the mentality was that “SMS was very much about asynchronous communication, a kind of ‘fire and forget’ model,” he says. Think of it as synchronous messaging versus asynchronous messaging, says Justin Santamaria, a former lead Apple engineer who helped launch Apple iMessage (now Messages). Technology aside, the social interactions around these messaging forms were distinctive. A digital door creaked open, and millions of us scrambled to our seats to see who had just signed on, who was down to chat. It propelled me into a universe of limitless pixels, endless distractions, and a penchant for bland screen names (my only embellishment was my basketball jersey number, tacked onto my initials). Very online, and unaware at the time that the portal would disappear behind you once you crossed through, that you would never again live a wholly offline life.ĪIM, which launched 25 years ago this month, represented that moment for me. ![]() Your parents got the compact disc in the mail, you plugged your clear plastic corded phone into a modem connected to your Gateway 2000, and you were off. You didn’t need to be a computer nerd to ride the AIM train. But AIM was the beginning of something, a gateway to real-time, all-the-time internet communication for the normies. Talkomatic, Compuserve’s CB Simulator, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) all preceded it. In the beginning, there was AOL Instant Messenger.
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