[struggle]

Um no. I was using the internet in 95 and 96 and FTP, Telnet, Gopher, and Mosaic were the only protocals in existance. WWW had just begun and IM was unknown until the turn of the century.

[George W. Bush]

I was using the internet in 95 and 96 and FTP, Telnet, Gopher, and Mosaic were the only protocals in existance. WWW had just begun and IM was unknown until the turn of the century.

I'm not playing Net Geezer here but aren't you forgetting Usenet (I used it in the mid-Eighties). And how about IRC (Internet Relay Chat) with hundreds of networks, each having many servers carrying thousands of chat rooms and tens of thousands of users?

Usenet and IRC were the Internet back when Owl Gore invented it.

[MitchellC]

Um no. I was using the internet in 95 and 96 and FTP, Telnet, Gopher, and Mosaic were the only protocals in existance. WWW had just begun and IM was unknown until the turn of the century.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#History:

"AOL had 6M subscribers using instant messaging when an Israeli company named Mirabilis introduced ICQ in November 1996[...]"

I'd imagine the 6 million AOL instant message subscribers didn't instantly appear the day ICQ was introduced.

Until late 98 (at the latest), when I got my AOL IM account, that particular service was for members of the full AOL service only.

[cva66snipe]

Um no. I was using the internet in 95 and 96 and FTP, Telnet, Gopher, and Mosaic were the only protocals in existance. WWW had just begun and IM was unknown until the turn of the century.

It was new but it existed in 1996 and was really starting to take hold.

In the early 1990s, as people began to spend increasing amounts of time on the Internet, creative software developers designed software that could reproduce some of the aspects of an online service. Chat-room software was developed and set up on Web servers, used by sites like TalkCity.

Instant messaging really exploded on the Internet scene in November 1996. That's when Mirablis, a company founded by four Israeli programmers, introduced ICQ, a free instant-messaging utility that anyone could use.

Source How stuff works