It’s a great trip down memory lane, but a lonely one if you’re the only soul you know riding the dusty AIM stallion. Of course, your AIM contacts aren’t present, so you need to bait your friends and family in to using this free-yet-outdated service. After that, we clicked on the “connection” button and changed the host address and port to redirect America Online’s client to Wildman Productions’ servers. Once it loaded without problems, we created an account through the AIM Phoenix website and then clicked on the client’s “wrench” icon to access its settings.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get version 5.1 or 5.9 to run on our test Windows 10 PC, but version 5.0 worked just fine. AIM Tamer provides a pop-up window stating “it makes AIM behave” and presents an escape button if AIM doesn’t play nice on your PC. To get these clients to work, you may need to run AIM Tamer in the background first, as after installing and running AIM 5.9, it completely seized our test PC, preventing us from even shutting down the process in Task Manager. Th e installer even asks if you want to make your browser’s homepage. For instance, the installer asks for you to choose your current connection: A modem or a permanent LAN connection. Installing AIM is somewhat hilarious as it takes you back in time to when web surfers m ostly relied on dial-up connec tions. Software for establishing your own AIM Phoenix server will eventually be provided as well. Also provided is an AIM Tamer program that handles AIM clients when they hang the PC.

If you go for the latter “lite” version, there are nine themes you can install ranging from Gray Moose to Incredibly Pink.

AIM originally launched on Windows 95 as a stand-alone client in May 1997.Ĭurrently, Wildman Productions serves up 10 releases of AIM spanning version 1.0 to the “lite” version of AIM 5.9. America Online kept the chat service active and provided technical support until it finally shut down AIM on December 15, 2017. By March 2012, America Online injected advertisements into its AIM client and let go of the development staff.

Download aol messenger