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 the story goes back to 1997, maybe before that, when i experienced online chatting in bbs's like peyam.net. i didn't know the internet and i used my rockville 56k modem for chatting, sending emails (only to the bbs users of course), and posting stuff to forums. it had a very simple command line interface. we used "/#" to see who are online and "/p [username] hello!" to send greetings to them. we loved that. it still seems more intuitive to me than the current instant messengers. when the bbs's were overthrown by the internet (perhaps because they employed the same resources: the modem and the phone line, and not because of the superiority(?) of the internet) yahoo messenger was not as popular as it is now*. in fact i and many of my friends started chatting over the internet with icq. after some time a few icq users branched out to yahoo and some to msn. there were, and still are, other networks like mirc which uses the irc protocol.
the newest instant messenger worth trying, in my opinion, is google talk. many people left msn and yahoo for google talk. after all i ended up having some friends in yahoo messenger, some in google talk, and some in msn. the first software i found which supported more than one network was trillian. unfortunately the free version does not support google talk which was my main reason to look for alternatives. among them i tried pidgin and miranda im. miranda has a nicer look but pidgin is now my favorite because it has a magical ability: logging in with multiple users. i don't have to switch to my old yahoo user name to check my "non-forwardable" messages. i have two yahoo user names and two gmail accounts and all the four work with pidgin on one client and at the same time.
*first version release dates:
irc: 1988
mirc: 1995
icq: 1996.11
yahoo messenger: 1998.03
msn messenger: 1999.07
trillian: 2000.07
google talk: 2005.08
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