I want that phone back. I want the internet from back then too 😭
T9 master race checking in!
8008135
8 777 88 33 0 7777 8 666 777 999
0118 999 881 999 119 725 3
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
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 :)
PM is assumed by you, but by no means mentioned or implied by the message content or context.
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 slang, and you might have no goddamn idea what something meant
So old people have their own secret language that young people can’t decipher?
For once, we have the upper hand.
Hey, who are you calling old?
Good point!
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.
Interesting. I always believed the SMS is 144 characters. Incredible we had a social where ideas where sent 4~8 lines at a time (depending on the font size)
Pre T9 texting was s l o w
it kind of created its own language though. that was cute
I got pretty quick on it after practice
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.
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.
Grok is this real?
nokia 3310 had T9, so no
I was faster without T9 so I turned it off
I guess if you disabled T9.
Get off my lawn, child!
Well the 3310 had T9 enabled by default
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.
I was so much faster with T9 turned off!
you had seeks?
Ahhh how I miss cellmania.com
And WAP sucking before there was a lurid song
