Most of the modern-day popular Linux/Unix ICQ clients are around today because of Matt's code, although his young life was sadly taken so short, we would most probably have very few choices for ICQ if it was not for Matt's early code base.

MATTHEW D. SMITH 04, of 2380 Petersham Rd., [Athol] died Friday, Jan. 5, 2001, of natural causes. He leaves his parents, David A. and Kathleen G. (Greene) Smith of Athol; two brothers, Mark A. and Peter F. Smith both of Athol; his maternal grandmother, Edith E. Greene of Delhi N.Y.; six aunts; one uncle and many cousins.

He was born in Dover, NH on Aug. 4, 1978, and was a resident of Athol for 12 years.
He was a 1997 graduate of Gardner High School and was in his third year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was majoring in computers and linguistics. He also attended the Rochester Institute of Technology.
He began programming computers when he was nine years old and recently developed the program MICQ that runs on nearly all operating systems and is used by tens of thousands of users worldwide. MICQ is a command line oriented clone of the ICQ program and is available for free.
He was active in the Athol Boy Scouts Troop 72 that met at St. Francis Church. He was the first student from the Athol/Royalston school district to qualify to participate in the Sate Geography Bee; he qualified in the fifth grade. In sixth grade he was the Athol/Royalston School District Champion in the geography and math bees. He took the SATs while in seventh grade as part of the John Hopkins Talent Search.
While attending Gardner High School he played football for two years, participated in the schools musical production of Grease and was named to the "Whos Who in American High Schools in his senior year. He worked part-time in high school at Wendys in Gardner where he was awarded "Employee of the Month." He delivered newspapers for the Athol Daily News for six years. He was a member of the Westminster Baptist Church.
Source: (Athol Daily News, 1/8/01)

Rest in peace Matty.