After sticking around for almost 28 years, ICQ (pronounced ‘I seek you’), one of the oldest messaging platforms, preceding even Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger, will soon be extinct. The service will shutdown on June 26, according to the official website.

ICQ became popular when most users were using IRC to chat. IRC, however, was mostly meant for group conversations while ICQ made it easy to communicate one-on-one.

ICQ was originally developed at an Israeli company called Mirabilis before AOL purchased it in 1998 for $407 million. Released before AOL’s own instant messaging service, ICQ had 100 million registered users in 2001 but time wasn’t kind to the platform, losing out to competing instant messengers and smartphone chat apps. In 2010, ICQ was picked up by Mail.ru (now VK), who has since owned the products as it declined in use.

Users were assigned a number that grew longer with the years because it was issued sequentially. The shortest numbers had five digits. Sure, AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger overtook ICQ’s popularity but the golden oldie’s iconic “uh-oh!” notification sound remains memorable for a lot of Internet users during that era.

When America Online bought the service, there were reports that users spent an average of 75 minutes a day on the service, compared with fewer than 10 minutes a day for directory services such as Yahoo and Lycos. When an user logged in, it hooked up to one of Mirabilis’s servers, allowing one to go through all the registered users to create a personal list of “contacts”.

Early on, ICQ applications were available for users on Windows, Linux, and Mac. It then came to platforms like the Palm Pilot and early smartphones when those came along.

The modern version of ICQ appeared to work like other messenger apps, like WhatsApp or Telegraph.