Recalling the early Internet days and what they mean today

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a ICQ chat log from the year 2000, containing extensive text conversations between me and a friend. I had saved the file in a folder with old documents which I kept backing up over all the years. Reading our old conversations did not only make me recall lots of memories from my teenage years, but it also gave some forgotten insights into how Internet usage looked like back then. It was a time during which my parents just had signed up for an ISDN flatrate, enabling me to spend vast amounts of time on the World Wide Web, which back then was in a Wild West-like stage.

Some tidbits from my protocol were published on the German IT news site t3n, generating more shares on the social web than any other article I have ever written. Seemingly people enjoyed the emotions they experienced while reading. ICQ was the messenger of choice for Germans (until smartphones came and WhatsApp changed the game), which means that most users have some memories related to the venerable instant messenger.

Publishing these tidbits here in a translated version would not make too much sense. But I want to highlight a couple of the learnings and realizations I had while browsing through what felt for me like a historical document from a forgotten past. Continue Reading