The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    remember trillian? or pidgin was it called? you could message every service.

    that was badass.

    • Orbituary@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Both. Trillian was not Mac only (I made a mistake from memory), Pidgin was multi platform but started on Linux. Pidgin had every protocol. I still keep my .purple config folder and logs after over a decade. Not like I’ll ever read the logs again, though.

      Edit: Guys, relax. I made a mistake recounting from memory. I didn’t run Windows back then. I assumed that because of the native Aqua interface, there wasn’t a Windows port.

      • i_dont_want_to
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        1 month ago

        I remember having Trillian on Windows way back when.

        I’ll have you know I did go back and read my logs from like 2008. I think I cringed so hard I never recovered. You might have saved yourself by not looking at yours!

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Trillian was not Mac only. I’ve never owned a Mac and used Trillian almost exclusively from 2002 until roughly 2009?? I can’t remember when the transition from IM to texting happened for me, but it was around then. When I was running Linux at home I would use Gaim, which was developed by a friend of the main Trillian guy.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I actually forgot all about that, but yes I did use Trillian at one point. Can you imagine big tech companies letting you use third party apps that didn’t lock you into their service or ad stream these days?