The Last Message Sent on AIM

December 14, 2017: The final countdown

It was almost midnight UTC time. It would be the 15th soon and I didn’t want to miss the shutdown, so I set up a Bash script to run the curl command at one second intervals. Every now and then I had to manually reauthenticate in the browser. It wasn’t elegant but it worked. Now I had to wait…

To pass time I searched Twitter for mentions of AIM’s last day. Plenty of people were reminiscing about their old screen names, but only a handful were actually signing on one last time. I added them to my buddy list and we talked for a bit. One lived in DC, one in Toledo. Another somewhere in Maryland. Two were engineers, one was a wrestling announcer! I made dinner and watched The Office while occasionally checking on the script.