If you haven’t noticed, people tend to die at the most inconvenient times. It’s a sad fact of life.

AOL found this out the hard way when the company’s AIM service went offline at around 5:00 PM EDT, right as the news of Michael Jackson’s death started passing around the Internet. The company had previously planned a routine software update that shouldn’t have interrupted users’ normal experience.

Instead, the surge in traffic as everyone was all atwitter over Michael Jackson’s death strained the company’s servers too far, and AIM went offline. Service was restored about forty minutes later.

We wouldn’t go as far as to say that the AIM outage forced users to use other communication platforms, but AIM was far from the only site used yesterday. Trendrr reported 250,000 tweets mentioning Michael Jackson and Google News found more than 3,000 articles written about him yesterday alone. Keynote Systems, a company who tracks website performance, noted that the average time to access a news website doubled from 4 to 9 seconds yesterday.

Michael Jackson’s passing is a sad event, but as the currently trending topics show, many are honoring him with their tweets, a trend certain to continue.

A lot of people just haven’t gotten used to the new AOL Instant Messenger style. It’s completely different after all, and functionality or not, many people just want to chat — not video conference, not voice chat, just and lol and brb their nearest and dearest Internet friends.

So I dug deep into 15 years worth of archives and saving just about every file and found an old version of Instant Messenger from 2000 believed to be AIM 4.x.

Enjoy: [download id="3"]

Also, here’s AIM+
[download id="4"]
Happy Retro-AIMing!

Wikipedia’s list of AIM versions:

• AIM 1.5.234, with an unknown release date (for various Linux distributions)
• AIM 1.5.286, with an unknown release date (for various Linux distributions)
• AIM 4.3, with an unknown release date (for Mac OS 8.6 and earlier)
• AIM 4.3.2229, released in 2000, included with Netscape Communicator.
• AIM 4.7.1333, released on February 18, 2004 (for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9)
• AIM 4.8.2790, released on November 26, 2001 (for Windows 95)
• AIM 5.0.2829, released in September 2002 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.1.3101, released in November 2002 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.2.3292, released in July 2003 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.5.3595, released in May 2004 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3702, September 2004 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3797, unknown release date (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3844, unknown release date (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3857, unknown release date (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.6089, released on August 31, 2006 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 6.0.28.1, unknown release date (for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)
• AIM 6.1.32.1, released on March 27, 2007 (for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)
• AIM 6.1.41.2, released on May 3, 2007 for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)
• AIM 6.5.4.16, released on October 10, 2007 for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)

• AIM Pro 1.3 build 260, released on November 1, 2006 (for Windows 2000/XP)
• AIM Express, unknown release date, online version.
• AIM ET / LAIM / AIM Lite 0.31 Beta, released on June 9, 2007 (for Windows 2000/XP/Vista)

And if you’re really interested in retro instant messaging, check out the World’s Slowest Instant Messenger.