I’m trying to determine the date when I registered my ICQ account. All I know is the UID, the password, and the year (1999).
I have repeatedly asked ICQ and their parent company in a friendly manner, but they ignore all my e-mails.
I have logged in and looked carefully in the web.icq.com interface, but there is no such information available anywhere in its interface. I even studied the JSON blobs sent back from the site to my browser, which sometimes can contain such information (and surprising amounts of other stuff…), but even that just returns the barebones data. No creation date.
I have also searched countless times online but, of course, there are no relevant search results.
I cannot resist adding a small remark: it’s an absolutely surreal feeling to be logged in to such an old account, with the last person I chatted with logged out over 20 years ago. I keep feeling as if suddenly, an old Internet friend is going to pop up on my screen while I’m logged in and send me a message… but it’s all empty. So very, very empty…
