AOL's Instant Messenger was the unsung hero of the early-aughts

It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.That statement doesn't make sense on the face of it even to me, since I only used AOL in the 1990s for a short time before I found cheaper ways to get online at home. And I scoffed at all the chat functionality within AOL and didn't understand how a friend was ride or die for their chat room buddies from AOL and kept an AOL account going for years after they needed it, just to talk to their AOL friends.Photo by CDC / UnsplashMy first usage of instant messaging was downright jurassic. Back in grad school in the mid-1990s, every grad student had an account on an old 1970s VAX/VMS system, and you could use command-line functions to see who else was online at the terminal just like you were, then you could start a >TALK session that was truly instant (you could even watch people type out their messages to you and see them fix their…