TiK

TiK was an open source instant messaging client for the AOL Instant Messenger service, which used AOL's TOC protocol. It was written in Tcl, using the Tk GUI framework. Reportedly, the "T" and the "K" in TiK's name stands for "Tk", and the "i" stands for "instant messenger".

It was originally created and maintained by AOL, and the first public release, version 0.25 Beta, was made available on November 20, 1998. AOL continued to maintain TiK until the release of version 0.75 Beta on July 13, 1999. By December 1999, the project was abandoned by AOL and its official website had been silently removed, with a promised subsequent release having never materialized. Several unofficial forks emerged to continue development and fill the vacuum left by AOL, the most prominent being the one hosted at SourceForge. This fork, too, eventually stalled; its last release was version 0.90, in June 2001.

With the discontinuation of the AIM service in 2017, TiK and other AIM clients are now of primarily historical interest.