053 - On AOL Instant Messenger - May it Rest in Peace

Summary

Hello Zengineer Friends!! This week we're diving into text based digital communication!! Hooray. Yeah, we're excited too. What's that you ask? Texting? Yeah, kinda. Tweets? Yup, sorta. Email? Of course... We've been inspired by the deprecation of one of the earliest forms of mass digital communication, AOL Instant Messanger (AIM). Yup, that one with the yellow running man icon. We both used it extensively as kids and into college, but whatever happened to it? Well, it was totally dicontinued just a little while ago, despite having previously enabled hundreds of millions of people to communicate every day. In this episode, we dive into a little bit of the tech, a little bit of the nostalgia, and whole lot of the thrill of communicating with others. We trace the history of text based messages like AIM all the way into the weird world of today where you can send an "instant" digital communication to a space station in orbit, and get a response --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/zengineering-podcast/support