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.
replyAnyway, 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.
ICQ and AIM. Later, whatever the first Google one was. When it looked like ICQ or AIM.
replyIt was very popular, no argument about it, especially among then youngsters. But "everybody" blows it of proportion way too much.
reply>ICQ was not some elite hacker thing
Sure, exactly IRC was that hacker thing.
ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.
replyThis is type mismatch + incorrect assumptions. In 2001 ICQ went over 100 mln registered UINs. Which is not the same as "active users", it's all registrations from the inception (minus 10000 reserved). Losing UINs was a very common thing. Password recovery required email, which wasn't obligatory during registration, even if entered wasn't verified, back then few people knew what "password manager" is, and finally emails weren't particularly stable identity before gmail. But even if we would, for the sake of argument, assume the number as active users count, regular internet users by that time were numbered at more than half a billion. So even with absolutely unrealistically high estimation, ICQ share would be less than 20% of then internet population. And more realistic is probably 10-15%.
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