Sherlocked: How AOL Paved the Way for Apple’s iMessage

Most software developers and engineers know what it means to be sherlocked — the worst of fates for an app. The term was first coined in the early 2000s when Apple implemented its Sherlock search tool in Mac OS 8. Sherlock shipped only a few months after Karelia Software made a similar third-party application for the Mac called Watson. Watson was sherlocked.

This is a look at the rise and fall of AOL due to a transition to broadband, the emergence of SMS text messaging and a merger gone wrong. With its creation of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), the company broke through the barriers of communication by reducing the cost, increasing the speed, and expanding the scope of this new, instant communication method to over 35 million users at its peak.