13 Things You Totally Did on AOL Instant Messenger Growing Up

The lyrics, font, color, and everything else you chose needed to send the right message.

Your away message would have the lyrics and "brb, dont' talk 2 me," but you knew you were hoping someone would.

You never wanted to sign on too late and miss all the gossip, or worse, your crush.

You weren't cool if you didn't follow the style guide of all caps, 0's instead of o's, and a lowercase i in anything you wrote for your profile or away message.

You could spend hours talking to SmarterChild and laughing at every single response.

Obviously, you needed separate lists for your best friends, crushes, and regular friends.

You had one for each of your moods and all your friends.

Obviously, you were out but you wanted everyone to know just how busy you were and with whom.

First, you started with something innocent like twothumbsup456 but slowly graduated to using upper and lowercase letters and x's.

We all gave Yahoo and MSN a chance, but nothing compared to AIM.

Sure, one conversation was 10 pages long and your parents would yell at you for printing it, but you needed your friends to see what your crush wrote.

No one said bye or k; it was all about g2g, ttyl, brb, lol, rotfl, and of course, a/s/l.