Needless to say, AOL was not thrilled.Īs former AOL engineer Eric Bosco recounts, any messenger service that connected to AIM's network was required to provide a version type. Right out of the gate, it caught the attention of rival AOL seeing as Microsoft had coded MSN Messenger Service to be able to chat with AIM account holders. Version 1.0 of MSN Messenger Service shipped with a Spartan feature set including plain text messaging and a basic contact list. Even Yahoo's messaging client beat Microsoft's to market by over a year, but as Microsoft proved, you don't have to be first to reach the top.Ī key decision at the time was Microsoft's integration with Hotmail, leveraging the sheer popularity of the web email service owned by the company, to offer those millions of users the ability of instant communication. Microsoft's entry launched on July 22, 1999, which was already late considering ICQ had been around for nearly three years and AOL had followed with AIM in the spring of 1997. E-mail was a popular method of communication among those with access to a computer, but it lacked the real-time feel that makes in-person conversation so appealing.įor that, you needed an instant messaging program, and when the mainstream Internet movement really started to take root, there were four major competitors jockeying for position: AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft's MSN Messenger.

Texting was still in its infancy as very few people actually owned mobile phones at that point. It was the late 90s and social media platforms like MySpace and Facebook didn't yet exist.

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