alt Hacker NewsWhen ICQ was at its peak, users of any chat software were a rather thin layer of population. So "everybody" is more than exaggeration.
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pdntspa • yesterday at 6:08 PM
ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.
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Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.
Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.