Do you remember… AIM away messages?

Long before anyone posted a status, there was the AIM away message. Step away from the computer and you left a little note behind, and anyone who messaged you got it back automatically. It might simply say you were at dinner. More often it was a song lyric, an in-joke, or a carefully worded line meant for one particular person on your buddy list.

The craft was all in the wording. Too keen looked desperate, and too vague got no reaction at all. People read their friends’ away messages the way we check stories now, and plenty of the people who set one weren’t away at all. They just wanted it seen.

AOL Instant Messenger launched in 1997 and ran for twenty years. When AOL’s parent company, Oath, switched it off on 15 December 2017, its goodbye remembered the carefully curated away messages people had spent years writing.

A whole generation learned to write in public there, one away message at a time.