Pure nostalgia: Do you still recognize these apps from your youth? | Technique

ICQ is pronounced “I’m asking you“, which you can translate as “I’m looking for you.” The program was the most popular chat app in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After school, friends met to chat virtually or even do their homework together online.

ICQ became very popular through word of mouth and hence did not have to spend any budget on advertising. It was one of the first apps to go viral. ICQ had one annoying feature: in the early days, you had to search for other users via their “UIN”, a kind of code instead of, say, an email address.

ICQ peaked at the end of 2001 with 117 million users. Then things got more difficult because competitors Yahoo and Microsoft also launched chatbots. The program has remained popular for a long time in countries where people speak Russian.

By the way, ICQ still exists. It is owned by the Russian company Mail.ru and was recently renamed “ICQ New”. But it’s nowhere near as popular as it used to be. Currently, just over ten million people still talk to ICQ. Anyone who has used it in the past will no doubt remember the absolutely amazing ‘sounds’:

MSN Messenger — which later became Windows Live Messenger — was the king of chat apps. In the West, the program succeeded in toppling ICQ. The main advantages included the simple interface and friends lists that were not lost when changing computers (unlike competitor ICQ). MSN Messenger was first launched in 1999 and ten years later, it was used by about 330 million people.

The success of ICQ generated a lot of hype at Microsoft, as the company invested heavily in MSN Messenger and released three versions in a short time, each taking it a step further and offering more options. The first was nothing more than an ugly app where you could send some text messages. But soon you could do almost anything with MSN Messenger: from making phone calls to playing games to exchanging files. The latter was largely used by friends who wanted to share MP3 music files with each other.

MSN Messenger has been the most important chat app for a generation for many years. It gave users complete online identity, for example, by allowing selfies, the giving of virtual gifts, and the ability to block other users. In 2013, the curtain finally came down on MSN Messenger, when Microsoft decided to go all the energy (and money) into Skype.

For many years, Winamp was the most popular music player, especially for MP3 files that were eagerly (and especially illegally) exchanged. The strength of Winamp lies primarily in its beautiful interface, which you can also customize yourself using “skins”. You can also download plug-ins for the program that display animations to the beat of the music you’re playing.

The music player was released 26 years ago by the American company Nullsoft. The software was perfect for organizing your extensive music collection. This way you can create playlists and organize them in different ways according to artist, album, etc. Winamp also had a full suite of online radio stations, and was for many Internet users their first introduction to streaming radio.

Winamp also allows you to rip CDs: the songs in the albums are then converted in Winamp into MP3 files that you can easily keep on a hard drive or later on a portable MP3 player.

Winamp is still around and at one time was one of the most popular programs for Windows. But it quickly lost popularity when Microsoft started offering its Windows Media Player to users, especially when iTunes started gaining popularity in the early 2000s. Winamp version 3.0 also ran slowly on many computers, so it was quickly becoming history rather than the future.

IRC probably means nothing to most people. But for Internet pioneers, this was the way to communicate with each other. IRC stands for “Internet Relay Chat” and that name says it all. You can call it a prehistoric version of Discord. Via IRC you can chat with each other privately and via so-called “channels”, which are channels that bring together people with the same interests.

IRC worked with servers and “clients”. In other words: you can set up a server yourself to set up channels on it. With the right software, your visitors can then log in and chat on your server. Incidentally, IRC is a European invention: it comes from Finland, where it was invented by Jarkko Uikarinen in 1988.

Although IRC still exists, it is no longer as popular as it once was. In the first phase, local social media such as ASL.to and Netlog were an extension of services such as IRC (links to profile pages were exchanged to show your identity). But eventually, social media itself began to provide chat services.

It is not entirely clear who invented the minesweeper. Was it Microsoft that supplied the game to every Windows computer in the 1990s, or was it British Ian Andrew, the author of his book Mined Out? However, it was the computer giant that really put the game on the map.

In Minesweeper game, you can search for hidden mines on the field. When you click on a square, you get a number indicating how many mines are hidden around that square, or you hit a mine and the game is over. Based on the numbers, you can mark the squares where you suspect a mine. If you find them all without hitting a mine, you win.

The game is known for its difficulty, but it was – especially on early computers that didn’t have a graphics card – one of the few games that almost everyone played. the next Solitaire naturally. It was already included with Windows 3.11 and was installed by default until Windows Vista. Today you can download the game “in modern form” via the link Microsoft Store.

No industry has been hit as quickly and severely by the advent of the Internet as the music industry. a lot Geeks He suddenly started exchanging music illegally and stopped buying CDs. Two important developments made a difference: the invention of the MP3 music format, which made music files much smaller, and the invention of software for exchanging music with each other.

In 1999, Napster became very popular for this reason. The program itself did not have any music files to distribute, but it kept a list of everyone who used the program and submitted the files themselves. Other users can in turn get these numbers there. Naturally, it didn’t take long before Napster was taken to court and had to explain why it didn’t care much about copyright.

It eventually went bankrupt in 2002. But that was the end of the story: other programs that did not require a central database of numbers saw the light. These issues were made more difficult to address by the music industry. It was around this time that BitTorrent was born, a technology that would eventually bring other entertainment industries such as cinema and video games to their knees.

So Napster will forever be the origin of that revolution. At its peak, the app had up to 80 million users. At one point, Napster was so popular that it overloaded entire college networks. Indirectly, the company ensured that first businesses and schools – and then individuals as well – switched to higher-bandwidth Internet. The name “Napster” is still alive, but now it is Paid streaming service to music.