Story time…

When Yeni and I were first dating (in the mid 2000’s), we lived in different states. The 2000s were a fun time… instant messaging was just moving on from ICQ, AOL, MSN, etc… and Skype was becoming pretty popular.

We loved it. And we used it… a lot.

One of the first things I sent Yeni was a big cookie cake with a smily face on it. Ah, Skype chats.

Skype let us communicate with people all over the world… via text, voice, and even video for free. A huge game changer. And, Skype had an easy to use interface, cute sounds, and was absolutely simple to both use and set-up.

Truly groundbreaking.

After an early AstriCon, Skype and Digium announced “Skype for Asterisk” – an awesome integration that was quickly killed when Microsoft acquired Skype for an ungodly amount of money. (There’s more to the story, but that’s the simple TL;DR from my perspective)

When I was really getting into Kamailio, I remember playing with Daniel-Constantin Mierla’s “Run your own Skype-like service in less than one hour”. That demo still works by the way ;)

Anyway…

Today, Skype announced it’s shutting down. Sure people can “transition” to an account with Teams, but meh.

I moved from Skype to either just VoIP or Matrix… but am extremely sad to see Skype take the long sleep.

Thank you Skype. Rest in peace.