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?
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?
I believe they had international numbers but they weren't like a major presence outside of the US.
They were pretty big in the UK in the 90s too 👍
Oh no shit. Did they flood your mailbox with floppies and CDs too?
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 :)
Ah mystery solved then. I remember them being really into The White Stripes, so probably a western weeb.
you could get AIM without having AOL dialup iirc
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.
The AIM protocal (oscar???) was spun off around 2000 and could be used outside of AOL with the AIM client or a 3rd party utility.
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 :)
Trillian launched in 2000.
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.
to add to bortsampson, I know I had an aim acct in the early oughts and I never had the dialup