ICQ, launched in 1996, was one of the first widely used instant messaging programs, and its distinctive sounds became part of early internet culture. Users could hear alerts for messages, contacts coming online, and files being sent, and those short chimes are now strongly associated with 1990s computers and dial-up-era chatting. As ICQ faded from everyday use, its sounds lived on through soundboards, retro tech videos, and nostalgia edits, where the incoming file alert is reused as a shorthand for an old-school digital arrival.