You could set an away message in AIM so that anyone who tried to talk to you while you were away would receive an automated message. Fonts were a huge part of your self-expression, alongside your username and your away message. You could express your unique personality by choosing to type in bright pink Comic Sans MS, or – if you were us – in dark green Trebuchet MS to show how smooth and serious you were. It was possible to change your font in AIM, just like it was in MSN Messenger. Try not to think about that too hard this was a more innocent era, when concerns around internet safety were a glint in the eye of companies like Microsoft and AOL. You could assign icons like “Smash Pumpkins”, “Triplets”, “The Worm”, and, hilariously, “Vibrator Buddy”. You could give your friends iconsīrilliantly, the AIM Buddy Icon system allowed you to assign icons to your friends. The app clearly intended you to sort into “work colleagues”, “friends”, “family members”, and other similar categories, but many people simply used it to organise their besties and differentiate them from the randoms they’d added over the years.

Long before MySpace introduced the Top 8, AIM allowed you to organise your friends into categories. If you picked the wrong username, you’d be cursed with looking at it every time you logged on, and still, there were many “RockChick12182” or “CoolDude9082309” names. Remember staring at that username screen for minutes on end, trying to work out what you wanted your username to be? It was important to pick the right one, because this would represent who you were to your AIM friends. Let it never be said people don’t love the Running Man! 3. The logo was ditched in 2011, but returned in 2013 after an outcry. It was quickly called the “Running Man” by fans of the software and became irrevocably associated with AIM itself. It was created by JoRoan Lazaro in 1997, accompanying the initial release of AIM. Originally, the AIM logo didn’t actually have a name.

The AIM logo isn’t actually called “Running Man” Nevertheless, it quickly set about establishing a dominant position in the market, beating out competitors like ICQ and iChat to become the premier instant messaging service (until MSN, of course). There wasn’t much fanfare around the original AIM it was an app for Windows that was pretty much dropped onto the internet. Predating MSN Messenger by two years, AIM got its debut back in 1997. AIM was discontinued in 2017…but there’s a catch 1.

Do aim chat rooms still exist