When AOL announced it was retiring its seminal, 20-year-old chat service two years ago, a thousand ageing #2000teens shook their heads. It was like they were graduating high school all over again. “RIP AIM”, “AIM is ded”, “FML”: the internet raged in authentic early-aughts chatspeak. “If you’re old enough to remember the days of AOL Instant Messenger,” wrote Lex Gabrielle for Pizzabubble, “God Bless because they were the best.” “AIM is dead”, tweeted @chrisboudi. “To hell with 2018.”

Of course, it wasn’t just the end of a year: it was the end of an era. Just 14 years prior, as Bush and Kerry headed to the polls, Facebook took its first steps, and the iPhone was but a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye, the IT weekly CRN reported that AIM counted 36 million worldwide users.

Online chat was the thing that, until it came around, no one knew they needed, but once they started using it, as AIM creator Barry Appelman told CRN, it became impossible to live without. AOL Instant Messenger was where it all started.

We were working on launching AIM as a brand new thing, while also fixing AOL IM and AO Buddy List. And literally, I just lived at work. We had sleeping bags; we were in the office all the time. Every day was, like, “Can we launch today?” because every day was a day that people on the internet couldn communicate with each other. Because it was covert, we had no budget. Barry was friends with the guy who ran all of AOL’s data centers, and somehow wrangled, unofficially, some of the old servers for us to work on. So I to writing code in the morning and then in the evening doing the system admin and the deployment the code because nobody else was authorized to do it. To begin with, it was just a handful of us on the server-side and a Boston-based team developing the client.

One thing about instant messenging—in the dial-up world—was that when it showed active, you knew the person was there, they could answer your question. But once broadband and then mobile became dominant, which took a while, that became watered down.

It’s hard to remember before iPhone days, but people didn’t always carry their phones on them. They’d leave them on their desk to go to a meeting. I was a firm believer back then that we shouldn’t show people as active unless there were real recent signs that they were. The away message was the classic finding a solution to a very personal problem: nobody’s answering, what does that mean? And that’s often how great features, or great startups come about: there’s something you personally want to fix. Since that team was able to move so quickly and try things out, they did it.