Uh-oh! It’s 20 years to the day since the introduction of one of the internet’s most well-remembered chat apps: ICQ.
It was pretty barebones in its first form, released by its Israeli student creators in November 1996, but over the next year had versions available for Windows 95, 3.1 (not everyone wanted to upgrade) and Macs (presumably System 7).
Remember this noise?
It’s still available, and although it’s hard to say why you should choose it over the many other offerings today, it’s sort of comforting to think that the brand and basic function of something like ICQ can endure for so long in such a chaotic environment. Oh, and the desktop version is open source.