Who invented AOL instant Messenger and in what year?
In 1994, AOL Employee Barry Appelman hired programmer Stephen D. William and for five months they worked together building a prototype system that allowed AOL subscribers to have an early form of the buddy list and instant messenger. In 1995, AIM was launched internally to AOL employees. It was initially dubbed “the stalker feature” since many employees were uncomfortable having their co-workers know when they were online. AOL decided to make AIM available to its subscribers in May 1997. 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, somewhere 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 t
