So, Skype is now officially dead.

I am not particularly nostalgic about it myself, though I get why some are.

My relationship with Skype wasn't exactly a normal one. Not really.

I first installed version 0.97 beta in, I think, September of 2003, because a few friends were playing with this interesting new thing that featured reasonably low latency P2P voice transmission, as well as text and file transfers. I still have that installer.

From day one to it's end, I never really loved how voice calls sounded through it, but it did improve over the years, and it's VoIP was very low latency compared to other options, especially at the time.

I never enjoyed finding myself in group voice chats much, though I used it enough with individuals that, in December of 2004, I decided to purchase a cheap USB to FXS adapter, which allowed me to connect a regular analog telephone to my computer for use with Skype.
While this dumbed the audio down to 8 kHz, which obviously didn't sound as good, it did allow me to use a two-line cordless phone instead of being tied to my desk, but more interestingly, I had an old Realistic answering machine from 1986, as well as a two gong analog ringer attached to the system. This was long before Skype got voicemail. It really confused some people, and amused others.

In 2005, an internet radio station I was involved with started using it to take phone calls. Skype's audio quality was less than great for this due to some nasty transcoding, and I, as well as a couple of other presenters, went to higher quality SIP options, but for a few, Skype hung around for quite a while. I was proud to not be one of the Skype-using people on the station.

In 2007, I downloaded Skype for Symbian S60 on my then brand new Nokia E61. It existed for Symbian before that, but I think I tried it on my 6682, and it didn't work, but I don't remember why. It did work properly on the E61 and E71 I had later, but only at 8 kHz, as was also the case with the Windows Mobile version going back to 2005 or so.

I kept it running on my computers regularly from 2003 to 2011, though I didn't use it as much as some did.

In late 2010, I started working for a company editing podcasts. My biggest complaint with how they had been doing production until that point was that everyone was on Skype except for the host, and everyone was on a single mono track. Knowing I could do better, one of the very first things I did was to switch them over to a system in which everyone got their own separate track for further processing and isolation. This was during a time when most podcasts weren't doing remote multi-track sessions. Now, it's very common, with things like Cleanfeed, Sonobus and other reasonable, high quality options that just didn't exist back then. Even Zoom, with the right settings and a pro account, is very good, though not necessarily for the multi-track bit.

I still had to keep Skype around for a few years after that, mostly for guests, because, let's face it, Skype was way easier to manage than the system we had for recording at the time.

I distinctly remember one recording session where we had to pull in three guests using Skype, but I was still determined to have a multi-track session, so I pulled out three individual devices, each running Skype, summed the inputs and outputs together using a mixing console with lots of buses on it, and created four distinct mix-minus mixes for the three Skype instances and everyone else, so they could hear everyone but not themselves, and each Skype instance got it's own output, and thus, it's own track in the DAW... WHAT A MESS! But it did achieve what I wanted.

In May of 2011, Microsoft purchased Skype for $8.5bn. A couple of years later, they bought Nokia's devices & services business for less than they paid for Skype, and I, personally, was amused by that, having definitely fallen out of love (was I ever?) with Skype by that point. I considered it a sometimes necessary evil to only be looked at occasionally by then, and I figured it would just get worse.

I think the last time I actually used Skype for work purposes was the summer of 2015, though I did use it again for a couple of months as an optional way to call in to my internet radio show in 2017/2018, running on it's own throw-away device (an Acer Iconia W3 tablet running Windows 10, very badly,) so it didn't have to touch my real computer.

So, that's the story. Another product bought by a large corporation for a huge sum of money, eventually doomed to irrelevancy by multiple other large corporations.

I'll leave you with the following Youtube video. Contains some swearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E