ICQ for OS/2

ICQ (pronounced "I seek you") is sort of a pager for the internet: if you have ICQ you can send messages to anyone else who has ICQ in real time. It's incredibly popular -- among some people, it's used more than usenet is. It's been imitated by both America Online and Microsoft, and despite the fact that none of its clients have ever (to my knowledge) gone past beta status it has become sort of an informal standard for how instant messaging works.

Which begs the question... can we play too?

The short answer is "yes, we can." There are a number of native OS/2 clients that work reasonably well, as well as Mirabillis' own java-based client. The longer answer is "yes, we can, but there are issues." The latest version of ICQ for the windows platform comes with a lot of features that most of the clients available for OS/2 don't have, so incompatibilities will arise when Windows users try to interact with OS/2 users. Also, many of the ICQ clients are in various stages of development and are not the most stable of applications, so crashes can be common occurrences.

What I reviewed

I reviewed Mirabillis' Java port of their ICQ client, and 3 OS/2 ICQ clones. These are not the only ICQ applications available for OS/2 users, but they are the ones that seemed the furthest along in terms of development. Because I was looking for applications that seemed to have the best chance of meeting all the basic features of ICQ on the Windows client, I didn't review the text-mode clones that were available on Hobbes... and I did not review Licq, a very feature-complete port of a Unix ICQ clone, because I couldn't find any installation documentation available in English (it's all in Russian).

The ICQ clients I reviewed were:

- Mirabilis' Java ICQ Client

- ICQ/2

- ICECQ

- PWICQ

When reviewing these applications, I tried to evaluate their stability, ease of use, convenience, and how many of the features of the Windows client they were able to match.

Mirabilis' ICQJava Client

When the Java ICQ client first appeared it was notoriously unstable and would crash my machine left and right. This was a testament to the infancy of Java more than anything else, however, because this client has not been updated in quite some time and now that I have Java 1.1.8 installed on my machine it seems to run just fine.