AOL Instant Messenger | Today in the 90s

AOL Instant Messenger, launched by America Online on May 27, 1997, defined a generation's introduction to real-time digital communication. At its peak in 2001, AIM claimed over 36 million users and held an estimated 52 percent of the instant messaging market. The service introduced millions of teenagers to online identity construction: screen names were chosen with the same deliberateness as a CB radio handle, buddy icons were curated to signal personality, and away messages evolved into a miniature literary form through which users broadcast their emotional states, song lyrics, and inside jokes to anyone who checked. The service's yellow-running-man logo and the electronic trumpet sound of its sign-on tone became two of the decade's most recognizable sensory signals. Entire adolescent social lives were coordinated through AIM: breakups were delivered, friendships were formed, and homework was supposedly accomplished while dozens of conversation windows blinked for attention. When AOL shut down AIM on December 15, 2017, the announcement prompted an outpouring of nostalgic eulogies from a generation for whom the service had been an early digital home.