Chat wars
May 15, 2014 —
Carlos Fenollosa
Coming in each morning to see whether the client still worked with AOL was thrilling [...] One day, I came in to see this embedded in a message from the AOL server: "HI. -MARK." It was a little communication from engineer to engineer, underneath the corporate, media, and PR worlds that were arguing over us. I felt some solidarity with him even though we were on opposing sides.
A great story from David Auerbach, who was in the original MSN Messenger team, explaining reverse-engineering AIM's protocol to be able to interoperate with them.
As someone who used Messenger for many years, the piece brought me back in time. Well written, interesting, and entertaining.
Tags: retro, programming, web