I used to be able to type messages on these without even looking
I just checked and I can still type them into the air
Yep. When it’s the best option, it’s surprising how good and quick you could be with it. Plus it was super nice to just stealthily send a text message while holding your phone under a desk and looking somewhere else.
Used to get around the “no phones at work” rule with that.
And you’d get these messages like
yo wr gttg tgthr @ 3 w/billy- whn u b hr?And you’d have to try to decode what the hell it meant
“Yo, we’re getting together at 3:00 PM with Billy, when will you be here?” seems easy enough from ur example :)
We have the benefit of decades of parsing this sort of message. 25 years ago, this was like another language.
Especially when individuals or friend groups would make up their own abbreviations for their own Slann, and you might have no goddamn idea what something meant
Good point!
So old people have their own secret language that young people can’t decipher?
Hey, who are you calling old?
For once, we have the upper hand.
The 144 characters limit. IIRC Twitter had the same limit because at the beginning you could post on your profile using SMS.
SMS is 160 characters. In the early days Twitter really only functioned over SMS. The Twitter 140 character limit was to fit the message inside an SMS with room for other info like usernames.
Pre T9 texting was s l o w
I remember when phones where an arm and a leg in price purely because of T9. Having a predictive dictionary in your pocket needed a lot of bread.
it kind of created its own language though. that was cute
I guess if you disabled T9.
Get off my lawn, child!
Well the 3310 had T9 enabled by default
Honestly that was a blessing in disguise actually. Person had to slow down and actually think through what they we’re writing, in comparison to modern voice messages where it’s primarily just verbal diarrhea and the reciver has to do all the processing and filtering.
R u srs?
Fair, but voice messages are still worse, at least that example is short.
nokia 3310 had T9, so no
T9 master race checking in!
8008135
I feel like I skipped T9 somehow and just typed whatever key the letter was once, then some kind of list popped up with possible word choices. I vaguely remember being a bit irritated at how T9 worked, but that was ages ago.
Typing each letter once and having a list of possible words pop up is T9.
And we skipped all the Polish letters like “Ł” and “Ń” because there was a 150 character limit, these used up 16 characters and messages cost money back then.
That 1 time I got in trbl 4 snd 2 mny msg n bill was hi
you had seeks?
8 777 88 33 0 7777 8 666 777 999
2G still works here, so nothing is stopping me to use one of those as a daily driver
Ahhh how I miss cellmania.com
And WAP sucking before there was a lurid song
