(
Open
System for
Communic
Ation in
Realtime) The technology in AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). The Basic OSCAR Services (BOS) include Login/Logoff, Locate (find other AIM users), Instant Message (send message) and Buddy List management. In 1998, AOL introduced TOC, a subset of OSCAR released under the GNU license, which has been used to write AIM clients for Linux and other operating systems. See
AIM and
FLAP.