Let's take a moment and rewind to the days before iMessage was a thing and before many of us even owned a cell phone. This was the age of AOL Instant Messenger, or as many of us called it, "AIM." It was the first form of instant communication any of us were actually introduced to. I don't know about y'all, but every day when I came home I would spend hours on end having at least four AIM windows open at a time, trying to talk to as many people as possible.
AIM was a great invention for our generation because it was not only the first instant communication we had, but it was really the first way we could find out what other people were doing without having to talk to them. Everyone knows that if your away message was jus the standard "I am away from my computer right now," then you're an L7 Weenie! How many possible away message combinations could one pre-teen possibly have, one might ask? Well, if you must know I had at least 15 different away messages that I would go through. Whether it was "out with friends, leave a message xoxo" or "movie night w/ fam <3," I always made sure that my friends and, more importantly, my crush knew exactly what I was doing if I was not online.
Besides just having the ability to let people know where you were and what you were doing while you were not at the computer, you also had the ability to make a buddy profile, a.k.a. the first real Instagram bio. The infamous buddy profile was a way to let everyone know what year you would eventually graduate high school and what the initials of your absolute best friends were. Besides just the buddy list and the away messages, pre-teen girls spent a good amount of time organizing all their "buddies" into important categories and had them in order of most important, to least. 'Cause, you see, you had your school besties, and then you had your camp besties, and then you had your robots, and if you got them mixed up then it was just one big jumble.
AIM introduced us all to the important acronyms that we all use nowadays. Imagine what life would be like if we never figured out what IDK, OMG, and LOL meant. Our lives would be so much more difficult if we actually had to type out "I don't know," "Oh my god" and "laugh out loud." Although, as a side note, if we had to, I really don't think anyone would actually type out laugh out loud. Also, without AIM we would all have difficulty knowing just how funny a situation was by one using LOL instead of ROFL, otherwise known as, "rolling on the floor laughing."
All in all, I would like to thank AIM and the little yellow running man for never letting my parents talk on the landline while I was on the computer, for teaching me how to mess with the robots (now I know how to mess with Siri) and of course for showing me why being able to instant message someone is so important in times of need.
