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The Rise and Fall of AIM, the Breakthrough AOL Never Wanted. When we think about the spectacular collapses of once untouchable Internet properties, companies like My.
Space and Pets. com come to mind. The rise and fall of AOL Instant Messenger rivals them all. Once the dominant force in digital messaging and a source of innovations other companies spun off into billions of dollars of businesses, AIM is now mostly dormant. Mashable sat down with three of the early engineers of the program to learn about its origins, why AOL never quite embraced the concept of a free messaging service, getting hacked by Microsoft and the features that never quite made it to users. The 1. 99. 0s belonged to America Online. It had risen above competitors in Prodigy and Compu. Serve to become the dominant Internet service provider for American households.
Millions of subscribers paid AOL monthly for the ability to sign online. Its disks could be found almost anywhere. They weren't hired to build a messenger. Appelman and Bosco programmed in the Unix operating system. Harris had been a programmer at a small web browser company purchased by AOL. But together with a group of other engineers they helped take AIM from inception to dominance, then watched it fall into dormancy, unable to convince AOL management that free was the future.
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The Rise of the New Global Elite. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from.
Here’s the Core Reason Why People Hate Jews That No One’s Talking About. Announced through CBR today, Mech Cadet Yu is actually a continuation of ideas in a story Pak and Miyazawa made for a 2012 anthology series called Shattered, a comic. Get the latest science news and technology news, read tech reviews and more at ABC News.
Sitting with them and talking about the program, they exude pride for what they built and how it impacted the Dim The Fluorescents movie online in english with english subtitles 16:9. Internet. That pride is accompanied by a sense of . The concept is simple — companies concerned with its current products, profits and customers often fail to recognize and adapt to change even from within. Whatsapp is not far from their minds. That comes up a couple times as well. The app, which Facebook bought for $1. Internet. AOL is still pivoting away from its days as an ISP.
Under the leadership of Tim Armstrong it now focuses on video and its ad network. In another life, before a disastrous acquisition of Time Warner, it brought the Internet into the homes of Americans and controlled the program that popularized online messaging without ever really meaning to. It would be easier to call AIM ahead of its time if it had not become so wildly popular almost immediately after its launch.
In many ways, AIM was right in line with the times, just at a company hanging on to a business model that would soon become obsolete. Image: Bob Al- Greene. The Buddy List. The seeds of AIM began within AOL and the mind of Barry Appelman. Appelman joined after his time at IBM, where he worked on some of the first standards to connect computers over the Internet (through what are known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP). Before building a messaging program for the Internet, he created something else that would eventually spawn AIM.
Necessity, being the mother of invention, helped lead to what is now a near given on the web — the buddy list. Appelman remembers it was November 1. AOL still charged an hourly fee to be logged onto its service.
With most systems of that era, an administrator might be able to tell people were logged on, but they didn't know who. Due to the way its system was constructed, AOL knew not just that people were logged on but which users they were. This allowed for the construction of a location tool that proved extremely popular.
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At first, AOL users who logged on were not greeted with a list of fellow friends online. But AOL did have a manual way to search for said friends, if you knew their exact screennames. This function became so overrun with requests that its servers often crashed. Appelman reasoned that instead of having to ask, the program might as well tell you if your friends were online. Patent US 6. 75. 08.
B1 . You didn't have to check whether somebody was on, but it told you. So I just decided to do it. Two months later, AOL would switch from an hourly rate to a flat fee.
People could suddenly spend as long as they liked online. AOL’s infrastructure had trouble handling the transition. He joined a team that, unbeknownst to AOL executives, had begun to explore the idea of a messenger that existed beyond the . It handled around 1.
Bosco said the goals for AOL's messenger were set much higher: 5 million simultaneous users. Even that number would eventually be much too small. That requirement meant AOL's messenger would need its own code, particularly as the resources allotted to the project — technically none — would have trouble with that scale. AIM was being developed without any approval from AOL executives. But if AIM was to be a standalone program, it needed to run off some equipment. Offering a piece of AOL's system for free to everyone went against the company's entire subscription- based model. The engineers and product team had to fight against executives who recognized no value — perhaps even a losing proposition — in offering a free program.
AIM was unceremoniously put on one of the company's file transfer protocols (FTP), a common way for files to be moved from one computer to another over the Internet. While public, AOL's FTP was not meant to be a consumer- facing platform. But AOL's popularity had made its FTPs closely watched among those in the know. That night we got 9. People spread the word.
Bosco, who was eventually promoted to a management position and still worked on AIM, had to fight to keep it afloat. They could not understand the concept of giving away for free something that was of real value to the paying subscriber base.
One particular use case the engineers identified was in workplaces. One feature automatically probed for a way to connect if its primary port was blocked; AIM would run through all the available ports until it found one that was not.
This made AIM extremely hard for companies to thwart. Bosco recounted a call during which the head of IT of a major investment bank screamed at him. The administrator had tried to block AIM, but the program had eventually hopped around until it had attached to something the company couldn't risk interrupting: the port that synchronized time across the entire company's computer system. We were like malware from their point of view. Professionals flocked to it. The popularity of messaging meant other companies began to approach AOL about a way to tap into AIM.
Apple's first iteration of i. Chat was powered by AIM. Microsoft also got in the game with MSN messenger. While it found a solid user base overseas, it lagged AOL in attracting U.
S. Thus, MSN Messenger launched with the ability to chat with AIM accounts. This meant war. MSN Messenger identified itself as . So they tweaked AIM's system to cut the connection any time this version tried to connect. Microsoft countered. It released an update to its MSN Messenger program that self- identified as AIM. AOL blocked the attempt again.
After 2. 1 more Microsoft updates that attempted to connect to AIM, AOL threatened to introduce malicious code into MSN's system. Checkmate. AOL had triumphed. Microsoft eventually signed a deal with Yahoo to connect messaging networks.
Image: Jerry Harris. Some of the engineers that worked on AIM. Image: Jerry Harris. Above: one of the easter eggs AOL engineers included in the program and a sharper version of that image.
Pictured are some of the engineers that worked on AIM. Back row: Robert Morrison, Rich Bennett, Sue Mc. Carthy, Greg Parsons, Mark De. Nyse, Jerry Cotelessa, Jerry Harris, Anna Fang. Middle row (kneeling): Jim Crawford, Alex Brown, Bob Watkins, Kari Ziegler. Front row (sitting): Andy Evans, Bala Nair, Lu Lu Young.
The features. AIM was originally designed to exist entirely apart from AOL, but early on in the development process the engineers realized it would need to be able to communicate inside AOL's program as well. AIM became a bridge between the so- called .
AOL was able to control much of what its users saw and was intentionally designed to be family- and particularly child- friendly. AIM was a window outside the walls, where AOL had no control.
This tension between what AOL could control and AIM's breach of that security haunted the project from the early days, and led to the creation — and suppression — of some of the program's most innovative features. One of the first was the warning feature, Harris said. Bosco recounted times he would message a coworker with an urgent question and wait for a reply. Was the person there and just not answering? When would he be back? Enter the away message.? Launched without approval, Harris said.
They had no say in what went on the page, which they recount was usually a big . That idea was roundly rejected. It rolled out voice chat before Skype.
It added file transfer. It launched chat bots people could interact with, as well as a stock ticker and a news ticker. The engineers also began exploring the mobile space just as text messaging was beginning to catch on. AIM introduced the ability to chat with mobile phones. But with AIM bringing essentially zero revenue and costing money to operate, AOL did little to encourage the exploration of the features and outright blocked others.
Numerous ideas never made it past the development phase. The engineers explored ways to broaden AIM's user base, creating versions for set- top boxes and Play. Station 2 that were never released. AOL squashed those, Appelman said. Another feature that never made it to users was internally known as . A buddy could check out the files of a friend and select ones to transfer. It was not as functional as Napster, but AIM had many more users.
AOL killed the feature. Image: Bob Al- Greene.
Ghosttown, USADespite the wild success of AIM and the innovations it spawned, AOL kept it at arm’s length. AOL, at the time, was a subscription business intent on maintaining its revenue as an Internet service provider. It did not help that attempts to monetize AIM were unsuccessful. Bosco worked on putting ads into the program.