ICQ
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Mirabilis was founded in 1996 by four Israelis, Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Visiger and Amnon Amir, who met while working at a Tel Aviv high-tech company.
While searching for a direction for development, the company decided to create a simple and convenient messenger that would allow easy exchange of text messages in real time. Thus was born the idea of ICQ (aurally coinciding with "I seek you"), which became a revolution in the field of online communications.
They created ICQ in less than two months, but needed an investor to develop it. Yossi Vardi, Aric's father, together with one of the founders of Israel Chemicals agreed to invest several hundred thousand dollars in the idea.
The first version of ICQ was released on November 15, 1996. At that time, the groundbreaking Windows 95 was not even a year old, Nintendo had just introduced the N64, and cell phone owners were using them to talk.
The messenger immediately became popular due to its simplicity, ease of use, not demanding connection speed (regular Dial-up was enough) and free of charge. Already in 1997, the number of users exceeded 1 million.
ICQ had a number of features unique for that time: instant message delivery, notifications of reading, the ability to view the status of other users and the use of emotions.
An additional advantage of ICQ is the ability to correspond with several people at the same time and participate in discussions. On the official ICQ site (and not only) there were catalogs with such thematic chats.
Besides, it was orders of magnitude cheaper to correspond in ICQ than by SMS.
In 1998, AOL (USA) acquired Mirabilis for 407 million dollars. During the next three years it managed to increase the number of ICQ users tenfold, and by the spring of 2001 their number exceeded 100 million.
Microsoft repeatedly attempted to buy the company and make the protocols compatible so that Windows Messenger users could communicate with ICQ users, but Mirabilis constantly changed the protocol. As a result, Microsoft abandoned its plans.
Many users favored third-party clients (JIMM, QIP, &RQ, Miranda, etc.).
Since the protocol was closed from developers, each update was accompanied by the need to wait until the client was updated, but for many people these inconveniences outweighed all the disadvantages: protection from spam and flooding, support for third-party plug-ins, sending notifications of new messages to Yandex- and Google-mail, etc. In addition, third-party clients did not have advertising, which at that time abounded in the official client.
In 2002, AOL patented the technology, changed management in 2003 and sold the messenger to Mail.ru Group (now VK, RF) in 2010.
ICQ is considered one of the first mass messengers that made real-time messaging commonplace for millions of people around the world, becoming the ancestor of AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger.
In the 2000s, ICQ was superseded by Google Talk and other competitors, but remained the most popular network in Russian-speaking countries and an important part of Internet culture.
One might be surprised to learn that ICQ still exists and is actively developing. In 2020, Mail.ru Group decided to release a new version based on the messenger - ICQ New - a free cross-platform instant messaging system with voice and video support. It received clients for popular smartphone and PC operating systems, modern design and familiar features such as secure video calls and stickers. The main thing remained unchanged - the ability to communicate with friends and family.
According to Mail.ru, ICQ is used by 11 million people around the world every month. Of course, it is no longer so popular, but it still exists, which cannot be said about most of its competitors (Microsoft retired its messenger in 2014, AIM - in 2017, and Yahoo - in 2018).
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