Today is the day that AOL Instant Messenger dies.


Today is the day that AOL Instant Messenger dies.
In October, when Oath, the Verizon $VZ subsidiary that owns AOL, announced that it would be shutting down the service on Dec. 15, Americans who came of age in the 1990s nostalgically mourned the loss of a childhood staple.
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As Quartz’s Mike Murphy previously wrote:
For many who went through school in the late ’90s and early 2000s, [AIM] was a first taste of the always-connected lifestyle we now live. It was a fight to get hold of the family computer so you could log in to AIM and chat with the same friends you probably just left after school. It was a fight with the rest of the family to stay on the computer, hogging up the phone line, at a time before broadband internet connections.
Goodbye, AIM. You did good.