Today is the day that AOL Instant Messenger dies.
In October, when Oath, the Verizon 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.
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.