I recently had a memory come back to being on aol sometime in 2001 and chatting with someone who claimed to be from Japan. This was in an anime chat room I used to visit.

Was the service available outside the USA?

    • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 months ago

      I believe they had international numbers but they weren't like a major presence outside of the US.

      Ah mystery solved then. I remember them being really into The White Stripes, so probably a western weeb.

        • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 months ago

          Was that always the case? I remember aim being an app a couple years after I had left aol and I still used it but I wasn't sure if early on it was.

            • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              ·
              2 months ago

              I'm sure it was earlier than that. I'm in the UK, and I'm pretty sure I was using it at home in the mid 90s, and almost definitely when I was living away in 1998. I remember using Trillian to speak on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others around the same time :)

                • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  I must be thinking of one of the other chat programs then, Pidgin maybe? I could have sworn it was Trillian though.

                  I remember using some form of AIM after I moved in to my first place in 1998, because I was keeping in touch with friends on it without having the full AOL software installed.

        • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          ·
          2 months ago

          I don't remember them sending out floppies, but the CDs were everywhere. I'm fairly sure that they mailed them out, but they definitely put them in newspapers and magazines. My parents had AOL dialup, so I'd get a CD every now and then to update the software :)