History

In September 1995, the "Buddy List" precursor to AIM was launched internally to AOL employees. The standalone AIM became available to non-subscribers May 1997. The release of AIM came over a decade after AOL's previous QuantumLink incarnation had offered "On-Line Messages" (OLMs) to its subscribers.

Since version 2.0, AIM has included person-to-person instant messaging, chatroom messaging, and the ability to share files Peer-to-peer with one's buddies. Version 4.3 introduced the storing of one's contact list on AOL's servers and allowed for a maximum of 200 buddies to be stored. In addition, in the 4.x versions, the AIM client for Microsoft Windows added the ability to play games against one another using the Wild Tangent engine. The first version released with WildTangent did not warn the user that it was going to be installed. Newer versions do, because many spyware scanners flag the WildTangent software as spyware.

AIM version 5.5 allowed Windows users to video conference with each other and with users of Apple, Inc.'s previously released iChat. Later updates led the version of AIM to version 5.9.

The successor to AIM version 5.9 was originally named AIM Triton. Compared with version 5.9, Triton's programming code was rewritten and featured a brand new UI engine called Boxely. The first beta version of Triton (0.1.12) supported only Windows XP upon its release. For the first time in the development of a new version of AIM, these preliminary versions were made publicly available on the AIM home page for any user to test and provide feedback.