Pidgin was originally created in November of 1998 by Mark Spencer. He called it

GAIM as it was a GTK AOL Instant Messenger client. Mark started it because he

wanted to learn how to create graphical applications for Linux and thought it

was important to be connected to people with the relatively new concept of

chat. He used the public

[TOC Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOC_protocol) to connect to AIM.

At the time, Mark was running a business name

[Linux Support Services](https://web.archive.org/web/19981111190214/http://support.marko.net/) which helped customers with their Linux systems.

This experience made it easy for Mark to setup the hosting for the GAIM project

as popular code hosting sites like SourceForge were still a year away.

Mark setup [CVS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System) for

source code management; an

[FTP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol) for releasing new

versions of the project; and the project's

[website](https://web.archive.org/web/19990210175349/http://www.marko.net/gaim/)

which was designed by Jeramey Crawford.

Early on, Jim Ducheck joined the project and very quickly took over development

responsibilties.