The Evolution of my Communications

I was just doing some thinking...

In 1995, my parents bought a Packard-Bell desktop PC. It had a massive one gigabyte hard drive, 16 megabytes of RAM, and I believe the processor was about 166 mHz. With that computer, I started chatting online with my friends using mIRC. There was lots of trout-slapping that went on with that program, courtesy of the /me command. There were times I could go into one of the channels I frequented and see up to ten of my friends online at once. Ten!

I did that for a couple of years before switching to ICQ. On ICQ my contact list grew to over 100 people, and I think the most I ever saw online at once was maybe 25. I used that up until I got to college with a brand new Compaq computer (32 megs of RAM and a 2 gigabyte hard drive). Then I woke up one Saturday morning to find that Truman's network had blocked access to the ICQ servers. I made a brief switch to Yahoo Messenger... But ICQ remained at the front of my consciousness. I stuck with it through the fall of 1999.

The ICQ/Yahoo Messenger era came to an end when I started using AOL Instant Messenger when I started working in Res Life at Truman. Everyone on staff used AIM. EVERYONE. My contact list quickly hit 200 people. At the height of my AIM usage, I think I regularly saw 50-75 people online at once. This era hit its peak in 2002. Its decline (for me) lasted until 2004, when all but a few of my online buddies stopped logging in.

Then, for about 18 months, I was alone in cyberspace. I didn't chat with anyone, save for the occasional person who was logged on out of boredom. This is where my online chat history intersected with the history of my e-mail usage.

When we first got e-mail with the new computer, it was in the form of Eudora, an e-mail program that we downloaded from our ISP, along with Netscape. For a very long time, I used Eudora for my e-mail. Heck, I kept using it all the way to 2002. I believe that was about the time I made the switch to Yahoo -- because my Truman account received way too much spam. I used Yahoo for a year or so before switching to gmail in August of 2003. I was using Gmail when using Gmail was still novel and cool. I suddenly had lots of geeky friends wanting a Gmail invitation. I was a wanted man.

I still use Gmail. And I was getting used to living an internet chat-free life until I logged in one day to find that I could now chat with some of my fellow Gmailers right there in the window.

I was back in the chatting game.

Now I use Google Talk to chat with people. And it's nice. But as I noted yesterday, I just started using Skype, and I had my first video chat this evening. And I have to admit, it's pretty cool.

I can see a pattern -- my online contacts have used one form of chat before making the switch to the next best thing. It's a cycle. Here's what it looks like:

1995-1997: mIRC
1997-1999: ICQ
1999-2000: Yahoo Messenger
2000-2004: AIM
2004-2006: Nothing, really, save for the occasional Solitaire Showdown competition with Andy Stevenson via MSN Messenger.
2006-2008: Gmail/Google Talk
2008-????: I'm going to predict that the next era will be The Age of Skype.

So hey guys, Skype me already.