Don’t worry :)

Anyway, in case you’re curious how instant messaging looked like back in 1999… While I did find screenshots of later versions of ICQ, I could not find a good screenshot of how ICQ looked when it was the instant messaging program, back then (or at least around 1996), but AIM had much of its looks copied from ICQ and therefore looked similar. So, here goes AIM from around 1999 or so:

I find it funny that they always had that much space reserved for writing the text, although screen resolutions were only a third or a quarter of what they are these days!

EDIT: Oh, here’s an ICQ chat window from around year 2000. Looks similar to how I remember it from some five years before that. So:

EDIT2: Damn how stupid that UI design is, seriously! They are wasting huge amounts of screen space for some completely irrelevant stuff. “Enter message”?! It’s an IM app. What the hell would the text field be there for if not for entering the message? Also, the modern idea of putting the “send” button in the right side of the textbox is a really good one. Et cetera. But, back then nobody had really experienced anything better, so they didn’t really know to demand quality. But, looking from the present day, that design is just absolutely moronic. It’s interesting what you can be blind to when you don’t know of anything better!

EDIT3: And of course: “ICQ” is short for “I seek you”. The program was made with a rather rosy idea that the Internet will now bring all people together in harmony and that a communication medium for that was needed. Therefore, it had an internal “telephone catalogue” where you could find all other ICQ users and chat with them. I was living as male back then but had a name ending with the letter “a”, resulting in a constant barrage of “Hey girl, would you like to chat?” messages because people would just look for assumed females and hope to marry someone from the west.