The history of AIM, the early internet’s most important chat app

If you were an internet user around the turn of the century, there’s a good chance I could play a one-second long sound of a door opening and memories would immediately come flooding back. Memories of running home from school and logging onto AOL Instant Messenger to chat with your friends or your crush. Maybe memories of how AIM changed the way your company did business. Certainly memories of your old screen name, and the angsty song lyrics you put into your away message.

AIM was, for a time, the most important chat app on the internet. It also barely managed to continue to exist. The app was created by a semi-rogue team inside of AOL, and was loathed by the executives who wanted to keep AOL as the all-powerful walled garden it once was. But as soon as AIM launched, it became practically undeniable. AOL never figured out how to make money from AIM, or to pivot its strategy around its hugely influential messaging service, but AIM became an internet icon anyway.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of AIM’s rise, its importance for multiple generations of internet users, and its ultimate inability to keep up with social networks, texting, and other messaging apps. David Pierce, Victoria Song, and author and journalist Kyle Chayka document the platform’s creation inside of AOL, try to make sense of why it was so vital to internet life for a while, and wonder what might have happened if AIM had stuck around.

If you want to subscribe to Version History, there are two ways to get every episode as soon as it drops:

And if you want to know more about AIM, and maybe spend a few minutes reliving a simpler time on the internet, here are some links to get you started: