ICQ — There were times when it was as ubiquitous as "I'm asking you" — mIRC and a good FTP program. But after about 30 years of operation (many of which, I'm sorry to say vaguely), the end has finally come: A message posted on the ICQ website (via PCMag)

It's hard to overstate how big the ICQ was at the turn of the millennium. It was released in late 1996 by Israeli developer Mirabilis; Believe me in I breathlessly regaled me with the story of this exciting new program that let us talk to friends online anytime, anywhere, and this was huge.

At one point, ICQ had more than 1 billion registered users, but it didn't take long for other companies to participate in the IM action, slowing the decline of ICQ. AOL, which acquired Mirabilis in 1998, sold it to Russian Digital Sky Technologies in 2010 — despite its decline in the West, ICQ remained popular in Russia, but posted significant losses. 

A new version of the program was released in 2020, but has been ignored since then.According to a Techspot report, the last stable desktop release arrived in 2023/4, but the mobile version was discontinued in favor of its current owner, VK's own messenger system.

I haven't used ICQ in years, but still I keep a soft spot for it. Not only do I remember my user identification number — 1302192 — but I still have it. Technically, anyway: I remain in the ICQ user database, but the password (and the recovery email attached to it) is gone for a long time.

It's me!

It makes the moment a bit sad. ICQ has been out of my life for years and decades, but I always knew in the back of my mind that it was still there, quietly running away and doing that thing.The great Black Sea of dead and forgotten software is a small island of software stability. I sometimes imagined that I would one day wake up from a deep sleep and holy cow, I remember my password! And I log in one last time to see all those friends from long ago. 

Hell, I would fire a message. Maybe someone will hear it.

At the end of the ICQ, there was whining, not whining.icq.com "ICQ will stop working from 6/26. You can chat with your friends in VK Messenger or with colleagues in vk WorkSpace."It's not a matter of course by any means, but at least I'm a little relieved to know that I'm not in the Nft," he said.

Farewell, old friend. We had some good times.